WHISKEY IN THE BELL JAR

03/13/23

Writing is like mining. When I start digging I don’t know what I’ll find. Could be gold. Could be black lung.

Daylight Savings is beneficial to me. It’s about 6:30. Coffee has been delivered… a habit I’m on the verge of breaking. Glasses on and nauseas… a habit I’m adjusting to. Rising too early was just normalized by the powers that be, so the first hour when I would just lie in the dark pondering existence has been incinerated.

How was your weekend? No really, tell me below.

On Saturday I received an email from Substack saying that this is going well and it made me feel nice and I wanted to say Thank You to everyone who subscribes. It looked like this:

We watched the Oscars last night. On the pre-show runway I heard Jonathan Majors say he was wearing Geoffrey B. Small, a favorite designer of mine. That was a nice surprise. I also have a suit that Geoffrey made for me that I haven’t worn yet. I don’t know what I’m saving it for. Aside from his work being unparalleled, he works every detail with sustainable scrutiny and love for legacy out of Cavarzere but is from my soft spot, Boston. He also made my favorite long duster coat that I’ve been wearing live lately. I also wore it to read my friend’s eulogy in. My other friend Campbell who owns the store Darklands in Berlin is the bridge between us. Anyway Ke Huy Quan’s speech made me cry.

Before that Amy, Rainer and I went to the Apple Store so I could trade in my MacBook Pro for an Air. The main reason being that we have a lot of traveling coming up and I want to keep writing to you and every little pound counts when you’re flying in with gear and band and child. Also the new Airs are black and I find them more aesthetically pleasing.

We then got take-out on the way home. The person who took my order was next-level rude. Like me, he was also missing his left hand. Totally understand, my man.

So yesterday morning when I was backing up everything before trading my computer in for the one I’m typing on now, I got lost in photos and time and I had a folder saved named “Chachi” which consists of photos of my old friend and Cold Cave bandmate who passed away. I was shocked to discover it’s been ten years since his passing. I remember the five year anniversary, and the seventh, but wow.

I met Chachi in 1997. It was at The Space in Worcester, MA, an all-ages hole in the wall venue. He made a zine called “Everything Went Black” and I bought one from him. He also did a stage dive fully nude which seemed funny at the time but now that I’m older, it’s pretty obvious that it was a signal for “Hey Everyone, I’m feeling pretty fucked up.” He moved to San Diego shortly after and I didn’t seem him for a few years until 2004 when I moved to San Diego. He had actually left the city but moved back sometime in the first year of me living there.

While there we hung out everyday. Our friendship basically consisted of riding our bikes to record stores, listening to records and drinking while talking about records. We loved the Screamers and Hawkwind and Amon Düül and The Fall and Ildjarn and Sonny Sharrock and The Dead C. We both lived in Golden Hill, only a few blocks from each other.

In 2006 I left San Diego to bounce around the East Coast. When I decided to move and was trying to figure out how to get my bike and books and records out there, Chachi said it was no problem and just overnighted them to me using his work’s Fedex account. He was fired a little later but it was totally bitching.

I tried going to school in Richmond, VA but it didn’t take. I landed in Philly and bounced around neighborhoods there before eventually buying a home in West Philadelphia. It was an old brownstone built in 1895 on a street that was one block long and ended at a park. It was beautiful and had been renovated and divided into two halves. I lived downstairs and rented out the top two floors as a separate apartment. I wanted a home.

Around that time I had a found guitar (and had it converted to a two string bass), a drum machine, some free half-broken pedals, and a thrifted Casio SK-1. This combination and the arrival of the black Apple laptop loaded with GarageBand meant I had a new band. Cold Cave. It was New Weird America and I spent my days alone reading and listening to records, staying informed by the tail end of Arthur Magazine, ordering bootleg Giallo DVD’s, and weekly bicycle trips to see what Tom Lax from Siltbreeze suggested at the Philadelphia Record Exchange. With all of these beautifully terrible underground records coming out, I figured I could do no wrong.

Eventually Chachi left San Diego for Philly and moved into my upstairs apartment along with my friend and Heartworm author Max G. Morton. The house became headquarters for all things Heartworm / Cold Cave. “Love Comes Close” was recorded there and Chachi and Max were in the first live line-up of the band. It was a golden era and so innocent and dumb and we didn’t know what we were doing but we kept doing it. I had a six month pop-up bookstore and called it Juanita and Juan’s, a lifted lyric from the Eno song “Baby’s on Fire.” Ian Svenonius and Kid Congo Powers and Howie Pyro and Joe Carducci all did events there. Philly was wonderful and everything grew until I was spending more time in NYC for Cold Cave. Eventually a choice had to be made and Chachi thought it was best to stay employed in Philly as opposed to making negative money on the road. Totally. In 2009 I took an apartment in the East Village while Chachi stayed employed and in the Philly house. He moved into my lower portion of the house and we rented the upstairs to UPenn students. I’d go visit him every few months.

We still talked weekly… sometimes daily. He was always himself and that was a complicated person to be. He was smarter than most people... his humor wicked, loaded, sharp and hilarious. These traits also came with a darkness no one could deny, but the darkness only came out when he drank, which he did often. It was a heavy darkness.

As I write this now I can see two bookshelves in our living room. One is from Brickbat books in Philadelphia that I took when they were moving locations. I loved this store and saw people like Michael Hurley and Jack Rose play there. I brought the shelf to Hospital Records when they were setting up the store on East 3rd street in New York, and then with me to Los Angeles when they closed. The other shelf is from Genesis P-Orridge’s home in Queens, crude and hand made of wood and wire.

Then it was 2012 and I was living in Los Angeles. I rented a studio cottage in Silverlake and luckily met Amy in August of 2012. We were inseparable.

I would send Chachi care packages of books and records and he would do the same. I’d check-in but the replies were getting shorter and less frequent. I’d call and he sounded like him. Sharp but with an underlying something. He said he was working a lot and spending more time in New York and going to shows and buying records. The same as ever. But still there was that something.

On February 21, 2013 I was awoken by a missed call from an unknown 215 / Philly number. I tried calling back but there was no answer. Amy and I were talking in bed. Our windows were open and the sun was out. I got a new email. I opened it. It said this:

Wesley:

I am away in Florida right now. Christine, my office manager, just let me know that the first floor tenant at 4### R##### Street apparently committed suicide yesterday. I’m sorry to have to be the bearer of this bad news. The police are involved, as this apparently happened inside the first floor apartment. There was a gun involved.

I’d like to discuss this with you as there are issues that you should know about as the owner.

Arthur

We read it and I had no reaction for the first few minutes. Then a flood of tears overtook me. The darkness I feared and knew of had taken him over. That was the something. I had to call his parents.

Amy and I flew to Philadelphia to clean up the house. We had only been seeing each other for about six months and she refused to let me go alone. I hadn’t been there in a year. We rented a car and didn't know where we’d stay once there. People from the neighborhood reached out to be of assistance. It was a red-eye and we landed before 7 am. The city was cement and off-white and cold and black smoke from factories shot up to the sky as snow fell down. Our first trip together was not a vacation. There was a lot of work to do. The realty company had let his parents inside the home the day before to gather what they wanted and we were instructed to clear out and donate what was left. The day before that I hired a clean up crew to take care of the mess before they arrived. We parked at the house and went in.

I was in a state of shock but remained efficient in our tasks due to Amy’s methodical and caring approach, in between phone calls from family and friends and police and strangers. Chachi had washed the dishes. The turntable was still turning. I looked at the record and there a pile of black dust from the needle still grinding into the matrix of the record. The record sleeve was next to the turntable. There was blood on it. There was a little whiskey left in a bottle next to that. The walls of this room where I used to sleep and record were painted a matte black. In the natural dimness of the room it looked as I remembered it, but in the darkness and with a flashlight it was clear to see that all four walls had blood on them. It was not something the clean up crew could’ve seen. I don’t know what to say. The house did not feel the same. The energy was wrong. It was something neither of us had ever felt.

Would you believe me if I told you I’ve seen death? She saw it too. Death’s black hand. It was outstretched. A temptress, summoning, begging, demonic and dense. It was physical and it was colder than the winter. In the dark it was even darker. People forget that suicide is murder. It was violent.

The basement below the room, where my personal belongings lived, was covered in dried black blood which ran along the heating ducts and onto my belongings. This basement now possessed a chilling wraith. I’m embarrassed in 2023 to write that I believe that but I know in my heart of hearts that it was true.

We hurried through the tasks and stayed in different places every night. All were too close to the scene no matter where we were in the city. We never wanted to return to it. I had to sell the house. Along with my friend, my dream of returning to the West Philly park-side brownstone with my family in the future had also died. I never had a home and didn’t want a haunted one. There was magic made in the house, unfortunately it was mostly of the black variety.

On our last day there we had to go back and leave the signed papers to sell it on the kitchen table. We walked through the back door and into the kitchen and both froze. From there we could see the basement door with was open and there was the blackness again, hovering from the staircase leading down. It looked like the black smoke from the show “Lost” if you’ve ever seen that. It was real and we unfroze and threw the papers on the table. We scurried and got stuck in the door trying to exit at the same time. We got into the car and never returned.

And it’s now been ten years. I miss him and naturally there are details of the event that I’m excluding out of respect for him. I believe there were things that happened in his life that left him with a terrible void that he believed could not be fixed. I know that happens but also believe nothing is permanent. Last week when I began writing here I did not intend to fill this space full of sadness. It won’t always be this way. I’m writing about this now because I haven't and need to get it out. I just feel deeply that we are flawed and scarred by circumstance beyond our means which leaves open wounds that can be filled by darkness if we don’t take the uphill steps toward light. It’s so easy to walk downhill.

In the wake of his absence I’ve tried to cling more to the light, which has meant keeping negativity at a distance whenever possible. This comes with loneliness at times but I prefer that to invitational vampiric company. Everything we do is loaded with implication and underlying conditions. The yin and yang is inevitable so better to change the lightbulbs than wander in the dark.

I know that you are at peace.

More soon.