This is the story of the music of the abominations.

This is the story of 827, which was a magical place
where you simply could not fall off your skateboard,
no matter how bad you were, or how hard you tried,
where the men were all punk rockers, where the girls
were all wonders of the defiant culture of the 21st
century, as radiant, bold, and inexplicable as the
newschoolers code of art which they followed.

This is a skateboarding story about how I joined a
band and got hit by a car, and another story about how
I sold my soul to the devil. In the 1970s, I had
written Vampirella stories now immortalized in the
1992 Harris Publications trade paperback, VAMPIRELLA:
TRANSCENDING TIME & SPACE. I did not create
Vampirella, but rather, inherited her from the late
Archie Goodwin, who had infused an initially satirical
comic with overtones of Lovecraft, a "Cult of Chaos"
which mimicked the black magic cult of pulp fiction, a
cult some swore, was real.

Long ago, great serpents we now call dinosaurs ruled
the earth. As we all know from reading comic books
and various hippie religious scriptures, these did not
all die out before man appeared. So, in those days,
when both man and serpent walked the earth, the legend
of Solomon appeared, claimed by both believers in god,
and black magicians. And Solomon banished them in a
day and a night, telling them, "After these signs, you
may return. First the crucifixion of the Christ, then
the stoning of the prophet, then the revelation of the
golden tablets, then plague shall sweep the Earth,
then shall man's reign upon the world be ended, then
shall the old ones return. Then shall they come forth
from the old places, then shall they swoop down from
the skies, then shall they spew forth in slime from
the earth, then shall they come up from the sea. Then
shall their serpent yearning be ended; then shall they
rule eternal."

Some of the great serpents fled to the stars, some
went into the great caverns of the earth, some went
into Einsteinian parallel worlds, always to yearn for
the day that they would return and take back their
ancestral home. They are gone, but not gone, and when
they return, their absence shall be but a moment. It
shall seem that they were always here, that they never
left, like an errant lover that returns to our
welcoming arms. As we all know, sometimes they are
far beneath the surface, but sometimes in the Earth
only inches beneath our feet, yearning, always
yearning, to claw up, to return, to reclaim their
serpent glory. As we all know, they lurk in dark,
secret places, waiting.

So the Vampirella series had tied my name irrevocably
to the Lovecraftian pulp mythos, and, knowing that, I
had played that card in the late 1990s, as I began
writing a series of autobiographical stories that
would allege my own, and my family's, unwilling
association with the JFK assassination, under the
direction of the CIA's now outlawed and exposed
MK-ULTRA program. The first of the stories, called
CONJURELLA ...

Quantum Mechanical History

Though devoid of occult references, it had been
followed by a host of sequels, all recalling the
pseudo-Lovecraftian philosophy which my past
association with Vampirella had validated. And
suddenly, my comic book work of the 1970s had taken on
a new importance, as I booked such varied appearances
as the Motor City Comic Con in Novi, Michigan and the
X-Zone nationally syndicated radio program.

So on February 1st, 2003, in one world, I was heading
for an 8:00 pm appointment, at 5:00 pm, with the 1990s
Ann Arbor underground band, Frankenhead, where the
extra time could be utilized for further planning on
the Frankenhead CD we had planned, with me, the comic
book writer in a state of lateral expansion, doing
cover vocals for rock classics. In another world, I
was painfully early to see Frankenhead guitarist Jim
McGee, he would not be home, or consider it an
imposition to come just after 5:00 for an appointment
at 8:00 pm.

But in still another world, which was the real one, I
was struck by a car at 5:00 pm on Washtenaw, as I
entered Ypsi on foot. I was hurled through the air
and knocked to the pavement, regaining consciousness
only as I was being taken into an ambulance. Had I
been on a skateboard, and had mastered the ability to
push off, I would have cleared her left front bumper
in time. But, in the real world, I had time only to
make one leap before her hood caught me in the
abdomen in mid-air.

A long time ago, on another trip, before everything
happened in Dallas, before I was ever a comic book
writer, when Mama and Daddy were still alive, we went
to Detroit. We didn't go to Detroit very often, since
we lived in the country in Avoca, Michigan, so it was
a big trip. My late parents were paragons of The
Peter Principle in action. The Peter Principle, from
a how-to-succeed-in-business paperback, said that
people are always promoted to a position they can't
quite handle, then stay there. So, while living a
life of rural poverty, my late parents both became
nationally known authors and local school board officials.

So it must have been before the Kennedy assassination
that we made the trip to Detroit to see the doughnut
place, since Mama and Daddy were still nice, which
they weren't, for long, after Dr. E got a hold of
them. Dr. E had used both my parents, known to the
world as paperback author Alice Brennan, and St. Clair
County, Michigan, Board of Education member, William
James Brennan, for his experiments. Dr. E had pills
for us all to take, they were bad pills that made us
either pass out or think we could do whatever we
wanted. Eventually, they made Mama and Daddy as bad
as Dr. E himself, but that hadn't happened yet.

So we all went to Detroit to see the doughnut place.
We lived in the country then, and sometimes, at night,
we could look into the distance and see a dim glow,
almost like a sunset. Daddy looked at that glow once,
and said "That's Detroit!". And it was.

The doughnut place covered, I think, three floors. A
big sign on the wall said: "The optimist sees only the
doughnut; the pessimist sees only the hole."

We kept going back - I don't know why, and my dad got
to like the guy who owned it. Or maybe he knew him to
begin with, I don't remember which.

So in the other trip, the new trip, I had been hit by
the car after months of preparations for a kind of
merger with Frankenhead. Initially, I had intended
only a horror comic book based on the band's name.
Jim McGee and I had produced ashcan editions of a
FRANKENHEAD comic, reminiscent of my old
Warren stories...

Quantum Mechanical History

Warren was the publisher of CREEPY, EERIE, and
VAMPIRELLA -- the latter, best known for a 1996
made-for-television movie starring Talisa Soto and
Roger Daltrey of The Who.

But at the May 2003 party, at the Novi Doubletree
Hotel, Jim and I performed a karaoke rendition of WILD
THING on stage. Everyone loved it, and everyone knew
of the tie-in to the collectors item comics I had
autographed all week-end. Ironically, though now
penniless and unemployed, fans flocked to dealers
tables at that convention, bringing me a variety of
items to autograph, paying as much as twenty dollars
for items ranging from vintage Warren comics containing
my work, to the more recent trade paperback, VAMPIRELLA:
TRANSCENDING TIME & SPACE, by T. Casey Brennan
and Steve Englehart.

But May had brought an end to my stay with
FRANKENHEAD, and I found myself taken in by the
magical commune known as 827. Those early weeks had
found me barely able to walk after being hit by the
car, and sometimes I had to be helped to my feet. But
at other times, I was able to stand on a skateboard in
827's deep carpet and do knee-bends, or do drift
warily down 827's inclined sidewalk, still unable to
turn or push off -- capable only in my stance and my
ability to stay on. In better days, I had spread my
legs instantly in a karate stance, once, at a party,
while bailing. But at 827, I had taken my only fall
not on my feet, from a skateboard -- I fell into an
upholstered chair, in a sitting position.

That was the magic of 827. 827 was an aura, a bold
reflection of a culture somehow both sociopathic and
ethical, a culture where skateboarding was a
revolutionary act, where "goth" had become a
subculture, not the vague cross-section of shoppers
who had purchased my Vampirella comics, and my late
mother's gothic novels in decades past. It was one
such novel, CASTLE MIRAGE by Alice Brennan, that had
been reprinted in Leicester by a company known both as
Ulverscroft and F.A. Thorpe, that launched the
CONJURELLA autobiographical series in which I alleged
my own, and my late parents' unwilling involvement in
the Kennedy assassination. Propelling me back into
the public eye, I launched into a variety of
convention appearances, radio interviews, and
write-ups in fan publications and websites, including
the Austin, Texas rock magazine SALT FOR SLUGS, which
included me in their Winter 1998 issue.

So this was how it all ended. The day before the
black-out, 827 closed and I was never to see it again.
Instead, on August 14, 2003, I sat on a porch with
Jim McGee of FRANKENHEAD in a darkened Ypsilanti, not
far from where I had been hit by a car. A kind of
glowing fog hung low on the darkened streets, and
roaming bands of dazed zombies walked about aimlessly
with flashlights. Always the band's composition was
the same -- white youths, a pretty girl in the lead,
and seven to eight able-bodied male companions. All
this, of course, had followed a day of unbearable
heat, and a sky glowing unnaturally reddish-purple,
almost ultraviolet in its hue, but somehow beyond that
in its odd blasphemy of sunlight.

As the night wore on, the bands become more hostile,
and, as I sat on the porch and watched, flashlight
wars would develop with repetitive shouts of "Take
that flashlight off of me!" and "Not until you do!".
All of that, and 827 was no more. And, in the old times, the nice doughnut man closed up
forever. Then Mama and Daddy made a deal with Dr. E,
like I said in CONJURELLA, and they got me involved
like a stooge passing out right-wing pamphlets in Peck
High School, in Sanilac County, Michigan, then they
drugged me and kidnapped me and made me fire first
from the Texas School Book Depository Building in
Dallas. Later, I wrote about it, and started
autographing my old comic books like I hadn't done
since the '70s, then, at last, entered the magical
commune of 827.

And then, long afterward, I went to visit the man who
had begun it all, who had begun 827. The Wonder Woman
girl was there, and this was how she looked:

The Wonder Woman girl wears a veneer of intellectuality
like Wonder Woman's secret identity, Diana Prince.
It is not that it is not genuine, it is only that it
conceals, but for a moment, an exquisite delicacy of
features, a lithe form, a face adorned with a wavy curl
of dark hair that falls down upon her face on the right,
though her hair is pulled back and tied. Somehow, that
one strand of hair has burst loose, and now adorns her.
As the evening progresses, more and more strands of dark
wavy hair join their lustrous companion, and it is a
slow motion cascade, as, one by one, the strands fall
along the side of her face.

The End

WHO SHOT JFK?!
EYE-DEAD
MJ-12
2012