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 My Cousin Archie used to live in The Hells. I don’t know if he still does. I guess he must. Do you get out? I don’t know if you ever get out. That’s an important question. Have to write that down on my pad.
My Cousin Archie used to make lists. He was an organzied one, always doing something or other, always with the projects. And I have Archie’s notebook of lists. It’s a spiral notebook. A big spiral notebook of lists.
I hadn’t heard from Cousin Archie in a long while and went by his abode to not find him there at all. But there was his spiral notebook of lists lying there on his impossibly big ebony desk. How could I not take it?
Don’t know where Cousin Archie is. Haven’t seen him in literally ages. But I have his spiral notebook of lists. If he returns, and he needs his spiral notebook of lists, I will tell him that I have it and have kept it safe for him.
If a person opens up Cousin Archie’s notebook, you will read on the first page:
ARCHIE THIS IS MY BOOK TIME TO TAKE CHARGE!!!!!
Then on the second page you will read:
10 Actions I Could Take Today To Improve My QOL (Quality Of Life)
- Buy a gun
- Call Handy about the disposal units
- Repent
- See about a new ointment
- Don’t give in to it this time
- Try not to touch it
- Pull the tooth (check shed – lot tools prob good solution there)
- Caulk the door
- Empty sink
- Empty tub too?
From Michael Galindo’s “True Murders: A Book of Murders & Murderers”:
CHRISTOPHER MARMALATE
“The Foot Farmer”
Christopher Marmalate, aka “The Foot Farmer” (b. 1916 – d. 1951) murdered fifteen young men between the ages of 16 and 25 over a single summer in 1951. Marmalate lived in a small two-room house with no plumbing or electricity at the edge of a piece of public wasteground outside Spirit Lake, Iowa, USA.
Christopher Marmalate served in WWII in the Pacific and was several times disciplined for assault and drunkenness. He was discharged four months before the end of the war after his parents, along with two younger sisters, died when a tornado struck their Iowa home, leaving as the only survivor Christopher’s young brother, Paul Marmalate. In April 1949, Paul Marmalate was killed by a train. The wheels of the train parsed Paul’s body into 7 separate pieces. Christopher identified Paul’s body after it had been discovered by a group of teenagers. The remains were cremated.
In mid-May 1951, 20 year old bachelor Sam Knauss was reported missing, after he failed to report to his job as a delivery truck driver for five days in a row and family members found his house abandoned. Sam Knauss had been last seen at an after-hours bar on the outskirts of Sioux City by bookstore owner Morgan Krieger, a bar Christopher Marmalate was known to have occasionally visited.
Marmalate dispatched his victims by gunshot, usually with a single shot to the head. Although in at least three of the victims, multiple gunshot wounds to the back and torso indicate the victim attempted to flee or evade dying.
Spirit Lake, Iowa aerial survey After shooting the victims, he severed their feet at the ankle joints. Initially he used a newly purchased hacksaw, but by the end of the summer a heavy axe was employed. Marmalate then buried the severed feet in holes carefully plotted in a circle around his house.
Though there was no way to absolutely match up every severed foot with its owner, it is believed that Sam Knauss’s feet were the first to be buried, in a line 24 feet away from Christopher Marmalate’s front door.
All Christopher Marmalate’s victims were from the Sioux City, Iowa area. The feet of each man were buried, within hours of their owner’s murder, exactly 24 feet away from the killer’s front door. The number 24 was somehow significant to Marmalate, as revealed by the many diagrams and maps of the area he drew and which were found strewn around his dwelling – marked with the number 24, or multiples of it, accompanied by arrows and cryptic symbols.
Marmalate died of a self administered gunshot wound – fired from the same WWI issue Colt revolver he had used to kill his victims. Police arrived to find the body lying in a shallow, hastily dug trench after receiving an anonymous tip about the murders. It’s almost certain the tip was a call from Marmalate himself.
Over 100 maps and diagrams, drawn in pencil on cardboard and scrap paper, were retrieved from the Marmalate House. These are currently held by the State Historical Society Of Iowa. The Society’s museum has an extensive collection of material about the “Foot Farmer” killings.
—
(text of a pencil-written note found on the disfigured body of a
male of indeterminate age, preserved in Arctic ice for almost 200 years)
He told me I came to life on the night of the second of April, 17– .
But I contest this – yes, contest it! I remember events previous to that wild night. And some of those memories of a distant past are more lucid, vivid, to me than these delirious days since. Sometimes I’m convinced that I am walking through a dream, almost certain that momentarily I shall wake up in the early dawn, with The Girl next to me.
And then I remember, lucidly, vividly, that I murdered The Girl, remember I closed my hand over her mouth to stop her foul imprecations, remember I closed my hands around her throat after she snapped her teeth deep into my hand and drew warm wet blood.
I still have the scar. There. Still preternaturally fresh – a memory of her frowning mouth.
My poor misbegotten rose – that she should be damned to find me. Out of all the many men who went in and out of her doors, the one she fancied best was by far the worst. Born bad. Born to be bad.
I went to the gallows with a smug satisfaction. I had maneuvered her murderer into giving himself up, for the most part genuinely unaware it was I my own self – my own own self, my own dark self – that I had betrayed. I had lured the murderer into confessing the entire crime, had made him hold his hand aloft in the courtroom, the hand which bore my gold haired Magdalene’s bite.
As the sentence was passed, as the judge donned his black cap, I suddenly, absurdly, recalled a romantic fancy she had – that we would go to the Americas together and start a new life, now that the war with England had been resolved and…
They hanged me -
A sudden rush downwards – almost exhilarating – I might have almost squealed like a child on a swing – until the sudden nonsensical snap to a stop and a notion that something dreadful had happened and then the gray cloud pouring into my eyes, nose, brain …
…and then being aware of sleeping – or not sleeping – being aware simply of being aware. An I that knew it was an I – but ignorant of its origins, its circumstance. An Adam on his first day in the world.
And God said:
“It’s alive!”
The voice shocked me into sentience. My eyes had been open – but now they saw. And the first thing they saw was a face. His face.
My ears had been open – but now they heard. And the first thing they heard was his voice. His voice.
“It’s alive!”
Those sounds – I could not grasp their meaning yet – imbedded themselves in my reconstituted head. I rolled the sounds around and around, repeating, refraining. Backward, forward. For days, for weeks, for months after – those sounds. From his mouth. To my ears.
It was a hot Bavarian June day which threatens a hot mosquito-rich August. I sat at the South Garden table of the grounds – sipping a sweet wine, hearing the bees, itching at the new exquisite suit of clothes, reading Milton’s Book – savouring the matter in its original language, savouring the mere ability to read and apprehend, again.
And those sounds came thundering into my mind – it’s alive. It’s alive!
He had meant me!
I did not know until that moment – that moment – as Satan looked round with baleful eyes – that he had meant me. I was it, it that was alive.
Oh, he had called me his child many times, explained his work, even explained how I fit into his scheme of things, but I hadn’t until that moment…
Cold sweat poured from my hairless torso and I tried to swallow and I could feel the weigh of my great cold tongue like piece of bland fruit in my mouth and I knocked the wine glass over and I jumped up letting Milton go and I had to tear off that fine new coat, the cloth on my skin smothering. Smothering.
I strode into the Baron’s woods. An observer would have though I was set with a firm purpose, maybe struck by a sudden memory of a vital, neglected duty. But I knew nothing of where I was, what I was doing, why.
Only those words:
“It’s alive.”
We went into the woods together – those words and I. Chased each other deep into the woods. It would be a challenge for the philosophers to divine whether it was I who chased the words or the words that chased me. That would be a challenge for the philosophers.
But eventually we threw our lot in together, the words and I, and we holed up in the damp boulder caves near the stream. Crouching in the muck, watching the woods with dread, I listened to the words – as if spoken with my own cold mouth.
It is alive. It is alive. It is alive.
The rest of the story you may know. If not, it is no matter and you ought to count this letter as the last testament of a criminal and madman, another of God’s born sinners, as a last petition of grievance by one more justly punished rebel angel. As the shout before the condemned man is hauled to the gallows. The SHOUT! THE SHOUT!
I grow cold.
Yes, I – even I – grow cold.
And I who need never sleep grow tired.
And there is no time. I who have lived now two lifetimes tell you – there is no time! This low latitude sun creeps along the horizon, as if ashamed to meet me head on, and whether it is beginning or ending the day, I cannot tell.
I can hear the men from here. I hear the groaning of their ship strangled in the pack ice. They have heard me too, playing at being the Unearthly Thing. Calling to them. How they must have trembled in their chilly berths!
All but one of them.
I must be ready for him when he comes.
But now!
Ah, now! Now! Look I see Him! I see Him!
My Master comes across the ice. His face is wet with tears.
My hands need no warmth to do their work. No light, nor desire, nor mind. Let my hands do the work they were made to do. My Mster only need come to me, my hands shall do the rest. He is here. My master is here.
I free my hands
Now I free my hands to do the work for which God made them
In The Hells, we all suffer. Some of us suffer in the open. Some of us suffer in private. Some of us take joy in the suffering of others and then deeply suffer when we see their suffering alleviated.
Some of us suffer from the belief that we ought to suffer more, that we have not suffered sufficiently, that we deserve more than we’re getting, that we deserve much, much more than we’re getting.
On the Way of Suffering…
Children’s dollies are strung up by their feet along a long bamboo cane, like clothes pinned on a line. A man in a top hat, with a big moustache – a cliche of corporate America circa 1920 – paces up and down the line, inspecting the dollies like a sergeant at a parade ground.
Eventually, he chooses a dolly. No one knows his criteria for choosing. He keeps it to himself. But having chosen, he pokes at it with an ebony cane, and the chosen little dolly is yanked down by duck-footed demons and is dragged over to an expanse of playground blacktop where once a meadow lay.
The demons, taking turns, bang the dolly against the hot black flat, again and again, until the dolly’s eyes no longer close, until its limbs become dissembled, until it begins to bleed.
The Children to whom the dollies belong – some of these children are old, some young, some of indeterminate age – these children play in an adjacent pit of fine, black, volcanic sand. A metal fence pens them in and keeps them from seeing what is happening nearby.
When the Children ask “What is that sound? What is happening over there?”, duck-footed demons tell them “They are beating a dolly to death. They are beating the shit out of it.”
If a Child is curious enough to ask precisely whose dolly is getting the treatment, she is scolded and sent out of the sand pit and onto the blacktop and made to clean up the broken dolly’s entrails and blood and parts, and if the dolly is indeed hers, she must carry its head around forever, like a bell.
She is not let back in to the black sand pit and she wander about The Hells, forever carrying around the head.
Often the man in the top hat, with the big mustache, can be seen with these free roaming Children, giving them hearty back slaps and laughing like a pal. Sometimes he’ll pop cigars into their mouths, just like in the movies.
Sometimes he will bend to tweak a battered dolly’s little nose or will ask a Child to hold the head up high so he can kiss it.
Here in The Hells you hear songs:
Werewolves Saturday Night
Prophesied by whispers of claws on asphalt,
two wolves tear -
their barks like ripping books
and bone breaking stone.
They are larger than life – they bleed
and breathe smoke through long teeth.
Stretching like a black salmon
he downs her. They tangle,
a spinning mangled yang and yin
made fast with nails and fangs turning
like a hurricane. Her lipless face
fires like a gun
removing an eye. A belly opens
a paw thrust in.
They spin. . .
. . .A vise hugging a vise, silent. Her jaws
enclose his cock-eyed skull.
Steaming confounded webbed in entrails,
he kicks. She squeezes, aching for brains.
He kicks her further open.
Stiffening she snorts red,
and he sneers, suffocating,
pinned under rods of rain.
By daylight, they’re a human couple,
bald and pink and washed.
They fill the street like smashed sculpture,
steam slipping away like spirits.
—
In The Hells you can buy and sell anything. At the Marketplace many treasures are exchanged.
One merchant sold rats.
Precious rats. Darling things.
On a bamboo table, side by side they lay on their backs, tiny bird-leg paws folded over tiny sterna. Each was couched on a bed of bright-hued crepe paper –red, pink, tangerine.
Some rats had teeth beautifully lacquered and enameled. A William Morris floral pattern on the teeth of one. Gilt and blue decoration on the teeth of another – peering closer I could see they were tiny fleur-de-lys. Marvelous!
One sleek hooded rat showed teeth scrimshawed with scenes from the life of our Savior.
Those rats of inferior quality only had painted teeth. But even these had colors that were rich and bright and pleasing.
The most expensive item on table was a trinity of black rats with tails braided together, and a coil of fine gold wire bundling them at the neck, into a little rat fasces. Their teeth were unadorned, unpainted, unenameled. But their eyes were six breathtaking sapphires. I don’t know what practical use such an object would have but it was very beautiful indeed.
I could not resist a purchase. I chose a white rat with aquamarine eyes, and teeth cunningly painted with tiny snowflakes, each one delicate and unique.
The merchant spindled the chosen rat in blue crepe paper, set it in a cardboard box on a nest of excelsior, and closed it all with a cheerful bow. A fine homecoming gift for a sweetheart far away, on a ship at sea, still many months from home.
Here in The Hells you hear songs:
Van Helsing Makes Amends
Van Helsing unfastened the coffin lid, peeled the crucifix from the bone-white brow. pulled the garlic from the rust-flecked mouth, careful not to touch the teeth. He stitched back on the severed head, and he blotted up evidence of Holy Water, and, full of care, heaved free the hammer-frayed stake, like Excalibur from the nameless stone.
Then rolling up his sleeves, he said:
“Now here comes the hard part.”
—
Power Sander
You’d be amazed what a power sander can do to a human face. You’d be amazed. You don’t think you’d be amazed. You’re thinking: “Oh, man, I know you could sand away a nose and a chin and a forehead and an ear into nothing in a minute. I know, I know.” You wouldn’t be amazed. Trust me. Trust me. You’d be amazed. On this here – I don’t know how you can see it under this light but – here. This here is forty grit sandpaper. That’s rough. “Coarse” they call it. The stuff that’s smooth – two hundred grit, three hundred grit – they call that “Fine”. ”Coarse”. “Fine”. Those are the two extremes, the two types of sandpaper. That’s like black and white, or hot and cold, or night and day. Every other type of sandpaper is somewhere in between coarse and fine. You got me? You got me. This is grade six. It’s really coarse. It’s like – you know how sharks are? When a shark slides up past a person, when a shark rubs his body against you, it takes the skin off – because the shark’s skin is very coarse. Like this. See? That’s what she said. My aunt. She’s a scuba diver. My aunt is a professional scuba diver. She took movies of sharks and eels and rays and skates. Some of her film has been shown on National Geographic. On the TV show, not in the magazine. Obviously. I don’t think she does any still pictures. Maybe she does. Her husband. Her last husband – she was married close to three times – her last husband was a boat pilot. The two of them would go down on these trips to take pictures of sharks. They were down in the Keys, I think. Somewhere down there. My aunt was down there by herself. I don’t think she was down there for more than a few minutes before the sea – the water all around her – was filled with about twenty sharks. I don’t know. I’m probably lying – or, you know, making that up. But she did tell me when she told me the story that it was a lot of sharks. She was just in a small swimsuit, I guess. She didn’t have a full suit on. You don’t need one down there. If you’ve ever gone swimming down there, you know what I mean. It’s warm. So she was in just a small swimsuit. I don’t know if it was a bikini. I guess it was. She has the most gorgeous body ever. I really swear. My aunt’s really just got the most beautiful body in the world. Trust me. But she was down there taking pictures of these blue sharks. Blue sharks are the most popular species of sharks that they have down there. And one of them came at her, she said. Right at her. And she tried to swim out of the way, twist out of the way, and the shark turned at the last moment. Like the last second. Not even that. Like the last half a second. Or even less than that. And it rubbed right up against her. Right against her, right against her. Right here. It rubbed against her right here, almost on her stomach, and it scraped off all the skin. From here, down to her hip right here. And this wasn’t even the biggest one, she said. It was about a medium one – kind of an averaged-sized one. She has a scar now. It’s always white. It doesn’t tan. I was watching it and it didn’t tan the whole summer. That is how coarse the shark’s skin was. And that’s how coarse this grade six paper is on this sander. It’s just like shark skin. I’ve never felt a shark. I felt a dolphin’s head once at Marine Land. It felt just like a wet watermelon, just like they said it would. But when I rub my fingers on here, on here, on this sandpaper, I like to pretend I’m touching a shark’s skin.
Now he was homeless. Ho hum.
Where would he live?
Nowhere? Or live like Thoreau? Live like the lilies of the field? Or…
Ho! Ho! How great and perfect was the white light bouncing off the flowers and lawns of this evergreen city! The light! And the eye-cleansing breeze!
…He wandered the park in awe, with a tuna sandwich, well-pleased with creation and unafraid.
The breeze had lofted enterprising seagulls inland from the Pacific and their wings were translucent Japanese paper transmitting the sunlight.
Gulls are carrion birds. He loved to watch them. They hopped and squalled and squawked and they devoured waste. They perched on the rims of oil barrel trashcans and dipped in and spread refuse about and they walked and they flew, and it was strange to see so many, many animals – animals, wild animals – walking around and flying around here in his busy city on his busy lunch hour.
He supposed they must be at it all day, though he only saw them during his brief break. Unless they took only one hour for lunch too. Possible?
He finished the sandwich, wiped his hands with the paper bag, and threw the bag into an oil barrel trashcan, then walked the asphalt path circumnavigating the park’s eponymous centerpiece – “The La Brea Tar Pits”.
Idiotic name. As every Angeleno will be pleased tell you. “La Brea” means “the tar”. So to say “The La Brea Tar Pits” is to say “The The Tar Tar Pits”.
The ancient smell.
The ancient petrol smell of the past – the tar. It brought to his mind notions of new roads and ways and of tanned men in filthy jeans – Mexican men – working in hours of sunshine laying boiling tar on boiling streets. Men far from home, standing on, dragging tools across, other men’s roofs.
He visited the Tar Pits with his dad when he was seven. His father had taken him to the L.A. County Museum of Art which stood hard by. He didn’t remember much about the museum, except that it seemed to be under construction – scaffolding and plastic sheeting dangling like banners and loud sounds of workers. But he remembered clearly walking past The La Brea Tar Pits. Stopping with his father and peering through the fence at something that was not a pool of water.
The place’s Master Pit is an oblong pond about a hundred meters by fifty meters that vents, at all hours, natural gas. Not far below the surface of the pond, a few feet maybe, there lurks an oozing caldera of hot tar that presses up from below the earth, pushing out into the world through a geological peristalsis. Every moment of every day for a hundred thousand years this football field swollen fat with petroleum, expels countless volumes of dreadful emissions. Plop, plop, plop – all across the surface great bubbles billow up. It is a carboniferous zit that has come to a head and continues to ooze – and to ooze.
And feverish mosquito men dip probosci into the veins and channels and underflows below and live on the riches sucked out.
He remembered seeing the Tar Pits. But more than the Tar Pits, he remembered seeing the mastodons. Who could forget seeing mastodons?
On the other side of the fence, fifty feet from where he stood back then, from where he stood right now, was a mastodon. It had the general build and hide of an Indian elephant, but the rustic lower jaw jutted far forward and the tusks were overlong, stretching, competing with the trunk.
The mastodon, an enraged grey mountain at the pond’s edge, bellowed helplessly as he watched his mate, water halfway up her back, sinking into the hidden tar. At the bull’s side stood a big-eared, big-eyed calf, little trunk worming out, mimicking its father, no sense that its mother, huffing and grunting twenty feet away, was lying in her grave.
The mother bellowed, struggling, trying to shrug the tar off as she would throw a tenacious predator. Pushing tugging and tugging and bellowing and tugging with strength enough to plucks trees out of the ground. And then with a guttural bellow, exhausted stopping to gasp like a furnace. Then – despite having torn her own muscles with the massive effort – doing the same thing again.
The Tar Pit permits movement in only one direction. Down.
The harder she tried to live, the sooner she would die. Soon the tar would begin to cup her great barrel body and the weight of it would vise her ribcage closed. Her massive diaphragm and lungs would fight valiantly – an oak defying an avalanche…and then…and then…and then…she would be suffocated long before she vanished beneath the surface. The constrictors – boa, python, anaconda – do not kill by crushing, but contain their prey in their coils and wait till the prey exhales before drawing subtly tighter. And then tighter with next exhalation, and the next, and the next, and so their prey, with no space left for air to be, suffocates. The tar pit constricts identically.
Condors circled as she died. The first to land nipped out the glassy, barely blinking eyes. Dire wolves might run the length of the pit, back and forth, barking, hunger-eager, but wise to the danger, well aware that this was not a free meal, but they remained in the area, waiting to feed on the other carrion feeders who would be lured by the mastodon’s cries.
One condor, hopped off the mastodon carcass and taking to the air caught just a bare wingtip in the tar, enough to stutter the take off, requiring an extra push off with a foot, which touched tar, the wings touched the tar too. Down he went, flapping like an idiot in the tar, doomed too.
The bull stood by all night and all the next day. Pacing and bellowing. Running off the wolves time and again. Trumpeting impotently at the dancing condors dipping into the cow’s slowly disappearing mouth, tearing pieces from her broad tongue.
Eventually, the wolves overrun him. They take down the calf first. They kill it. The father kills many wolves first, but they did kill the calf and dragged it away in pieces. The bull bleeds. He will die there by the side of the pit.
Animal eats animal eats animal. Living things eat living these. Horrible way to die. But this is how a lion’s share of creatures meet their end – murdered by a fellow beast, eaten by his fellow, chewed swallowed and digested by his fellow. Sometimes murdered beforehand. Sometimes left to die in the stomach.
He stood looking through the fence, with a few curious others, peering down at a slow motion commotion at the tar pit’s edge.
A big round black man grabbed was grabbing a healthy young girl by the waist, anchoring her.
The girl’s gloved hands were immersed in the black pool.
Periscoping from the surface was the head of a bird.
A seagull had somehow gotten stuck, badly stuck, in the tar pit.
The girl birthed the gull from the pit, pulling it, working it gently like a tooth – pulling and releasing then pulling and releasing then pulling and wrapping it in a white smock – exactly like the one she had on. She was a doctor? She was a veterinarian? She was a scientist?
After a long miserable time of it, the gull came free. It trailed a tail of black tail like blackblack paper, or syrup or licorice frosting, or like a snake with half a dozen shiny black skinny tails stretching. Its hooked, long beak was harshly stained.
The girl and man set the bird in a clean cardboard box – “Waste Management”
“Will the bird live?” he asked.
The woman pointed her hand at him and seesawed it left and right.
A small crowd of men and women and children too had gathered, peering in at the animal in the box – unwhite beaked head jutting from a kelpy black web.
The lid was shut. The box was taken away.
He chose to believe this:
The doomed gull, like its condor forefathers, had been diving down to feed upon the paralyzed fiberglass mastodon in the pit. Realizing its error at the last instant, it aborted and ditched onto what was surely only the calm surface of a pond.
You hear songs here:
Daedalus With One Wing
Wise Daedalus – with only one wing done -
fled before a mob
determined to string him up
and piñata the hell out of the man.
Running for his life,
he strong-armed the single wing and,
triple-jumping to the cliff’s edge,
launched himself,
leaving the bullish killers marooned.
As he made into the open air,
wing outstretched on one side,
inadequate hand flapping
on the other,
he knew well that all
the weight of science and reason
would not support him.
—
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