I hung a blanket on the wall of my house in Portland Oregon in 1975. For insulation and for decorative purposes. It had cowboys and cows in a band of design and I think Indians on it too, in alternating bands, cowboys and cows, and I think Indians. It looked a lot like a bedspread I'd had when I was a kid, except it was blue and red, and the bedspread had been light brown. One day I read about what were later called "cattle mutilations" in the newspaper. It said that dead cattle were being found in the Western US, with their anuses surgically removed. There were quotes from experts as to the precision of the operations, and of course the absolute weirdness of it, though that was harder to get quotes about, from a journalist's standpoint, I'd assume. Because what do you say? you're a cop or a vet, you live in the rural West, here's a steer out in the range country with its asshole precisely cut out and taken off someplace.
A day or so later I looked at my blanket on the wall, with its alternating bands of cowboys on horses chasing cattle, and Indians being Indians. There was a hole in it maybe an inch and a half in diameter. It was perfectly round, and it was centered right where the asshole of the steer the cowboy in that part of the design was roundin up would have been.
But that's not the story.
The story is the piano. The most beautiful upright piano I ever saw, taken from me without the slightest legal deviation. It was a gift from someone who loved me, and everything surrounding it, the gift and the giving and what happened to it, is tragic and a source of undying rage.
When I write these vignettes, most of the time I try to get it into a narrative structure that has only obvious conjecture, the rest is what I know to have happened. That seems really important, not that I know for sure what happened, and why, but that the difference between what I saw and heard, and what I think was taking place outside the radius of what I could see, is clear. That's clear that that distinction is clear to me. That there is a difference, that I don't know some things and can only suppose about them. Finding the indissoluble certainties in that is just about all I have to help myself with now, finding the things that have to be, the logical extensions of what is, that make it possible for these things to exist.
So you have to start way outside the immediate to get it in a context that's appropriate. I like to start in places like El Salvador, or Nicaragua, because what happened there is so clearly evil, and was equally clearly the work of the same men who ran most of the behind the scenes exploits that made the 1970's in America such an interesting place to be, for those of us outside the acceptable spectrum of social attitudes.
Discrediting the opposition, character and physical assassination, the demoralizing ripple-effects taking down prominent figures, maintaining complete deniability all the while, false-flag acts of terror, disinformation, cut-outs, and something I've never seen described anywhere by a pithy phrase, the use of organized groups to accomplish things that leave accountability entirely on the groups themselves - the use of vigilantes with easily-manipulated criteria for disposal tasks - the phrase "suicide-by-police" is like that, what it means is getting an existing force to do what you want done without your intent being directly obvious, until it doesn't matter anymore.
There's a spectrum of action and posture there too.
So given the atrocities in the relatively simple social and political context of El Salvador, that were facilitated and approved, if not planned and overseen, by American military personnel, the plank of flotsam I cling to still is it's so likely as to be a virtual certainty that the same powerful forces that sent those American military personnel into such relatively unimportant venues as El Salvador would have been fantastically more vicious and thorough on their own home ground. Which is where I was born, and where I grew up.
And where my profile, by the time I was 16, must have been vibrantly red-flagged. I keep returning to this because at one point it became all I had, everything that had happened seemed so bizarre and so unlikely, I had to start with what they'd done, what had already been proven that they'd done, to what were essentially minor threats very far away. Then I had to see myself as a threat to them, whoever or whatever they were. Here, where they lived, among their sons and daughters.
Since by the time of this narrative, fall of 1975, I'd been thoroughly convinced of my own worthlessness, repeatedly and violently, this was not as easy it might seem now, and a lot of what I've been trying to do here is demonstrate a little of what it might have been they were afraid of. I think I've done that.
I have these skills. I can get to the gist of complex things and explain them in simple terms, and I have a recurring allegiance to the non-elite; recurring in the sense that everytime I crawl back out from the wreckage of my life I find it again. It isn't love of the little guys for their own sakes so much as it's love of the commonality of humankind, a love that transcends competition and its sneering disdain for the left-behind.
That the elite are not central to what we really are, but parasitic and tangential, and that the little guys currently are the real center of human presence on earth is something I've believed since I was a teenager.
I had that attitude in spades then, and I was more articulate back then, less damaged, and way more emotionally alive and awake. I was 6' 4" and relatively good-looking. My thesis in all this is that I was taken out, at least to the point where I was more useful as a relic, an example, or even scarier as a droid, a borg-construct, a tool-zombie; and also, behind this - that somewhere in there another scale was operant, and that there were all along groups of positive force working against the dominant power at the same levels of anonymity and complex intrigue - sub rosa vigilantes of the good.
Back to the piano.
It's been more than a week since I last realized I'd have to write this, or begin writing it and see what it turned into, and every night I'd think tomorrow, tomorrow I'll do it, and every morning it wouldn't be there as a reminder, it wouldn't be there at all. Somehow I broke that cycle, maybe it's the sit-ups, maybe it's the echoes of Burgess Meredith or George Burns.
This is very hard for me. It isn't just painful, it's like a nerve thing, like my nerves were inflamed just thinking about it. Rage and a frustration born of no outlet for the rage.
Some of the details you'll just have to let go, this isn't a memoir, or even a story per se, it's a vignette, one scene in a long drama I haven't named yet, that isn't over yet.
I got out of the hospital in October. Somewhere between then and spring of 76 I went to the dentist's in Beaverton, somewhere between then and spring of 76 I became convinced I had to hitchhike across the US after selling everything I owned including my truck, and looking back now the most obvious sign of some kind of control and manipulation is that it never occurred to me to get another guitar to replace the one that had been destroyed in the events leading up to the hospitalization. It's interesting that it wasn't for another year or so that I even began to recognize the absence of the guitar in my life.
I still had the piano though.
Right there there's a wide junction in the narrative path. Because to talk about who gave it to me I have to talk about something I can't prove, that I only suspect, and that that suspicion fits the template of clinical paranoia to a "T". Call it deep work, really getting into someone's head, really working their bones, their minds, what they believe about the world. Trust is essential. So you can build trust, which takes lots of time, and depends on the duplicity of what are essentially people the subject shouldn't trust, and all the cover and bullshit that entails, or you can use already established pathways of trust. You can pretend to be someone the subject already trusts.
Ringers.
Manipulation by the use of individuals who resemble closely enough individuals the subject already has an established trusting relationship with. Add in the use of drugs, both in the subject's lifestyle - marijuana and other mild hypnotics, and adulterants, a pharmacopoeia I know nothing about except that it exists and has been getting refined since before the pyramids were erected. So, ringers - there's a shock I remember, I've written about it here before, when I was in high school and they came to the door dressed vaguely like a cohort of my friends, and then once they were inside the shock of realizing they weren't my friends, that these were older men and they were hostile and in my house and I was alone, that I'd been violated to a degree I had no contingency for. It's where good training takes over, what to do in moments like that besides just standing there with your heart racing and your jaw dropped. But of course I had no training like that at 17 or 18.
Ringers, but then, once it'd been so thoroughly established what difference would it make if they were ringers for or against? You were already in that deep. So who knows?
I remember too much that doesn't fit the standard narrative bandwidth, and too many of the loose ends won't gather and hold. There were others that close, I'm talking about someone I loved, not a friend, and at some dark node that all became the property of whoever held the reins. What I'm writing this for, the end I have for it, is to put clearly and for all time, that the governing body, the authority, the soft meat behind the exoskeleton of control was not omniscient, there were and are gaps, like 18 minute blanks in the tape, there were others.
So one of the ringers, or the original, or one of the originals, gave me a piano. We went to where it had been, later after. A really nice woman was there, a bunch of old houses, a tract from the thirties, or maybe the twenties. The piano like I said was the most beautiful upright I've ever seen.
It was a gesture of love from someone who was leaving me, stepping out of the hell we'd been living in. Or a gesture toward that from someone or something else entirely.
Later as spring got closer and closer, we were in a downtown sporting goods place, and she was trying to show me that I didn't have to take to the road, that I had enough money and a good place to live, I could get settled and heal up. I remember that vividly and this cartoonish spirit taking command so that I acted nonchalant and free, instead of completely ridden and compulsively acting out whatever I'd been commanded to do. That happened again and again to me, bad deals made in good faith, and no way to get in to the process, just listening from an anteroom; some thing that had been built in me making statements and agreements, and without destroying my credibility completely I had no way to work against it. A cunning device. I remember sincere guys insisting that I speak honestly with them, as though that was possible still. As though there were some magic lock that could be opened and shut again.
The shorter version of that is that I was responding to some compulsion, I was going out on the road because something wanted me to, some group or agency or who knows; but not because I wanted to myself, not willingly.
She knew that and did what she could against it. Plus she had given me that piano. That I was now offering for sale in the newspaper.
One of the respondents was named "Corey" I think, though I have a little whisper at the edge of that that it might have been "Cary". And of course that's just what he told me that whatever the sound of it it was his name. If it was a male; given his androgynous nature and the nature of later clots of negative force in my life it may well have been a female. He was small and round of body, hideously ugly but not in a grand way, just repulsive to look at. And he showed up one day to buy the piano.
After he left that first time I woke up a little.
And realized it was the wrong way to go.
Somewhere in there I went down to Corvallis and hung out with Hal, and somewhere in there he offered to keep the piano for me and somewhere in there I made up my mind not to sell it.
An ellipsis here because I don't remember enough detail to be able to say how it went from deciding not to sell it to what happened next, only that there was a day when whoever that was came back to get it.
When "Cory" or "Cary" came to the house, to pick up the piano, he had this guy with him, that he called "man-killer" and "Tex" in a nudge-nudge wink-wink sort of way. Later on, much later on, I realized the guy looked a lot like Tex Watson. A real lot. A scary real lot.
There's a spiritual aspect to all this that if I wasn't writing for a specific audience I would have begun with, the largest context available. But what I think needs to be here first is the structure, the sticks, the lumber of it, the immediate context, which is my life as I remember it, 30 years ago.
So when I read this piece at the Mae Brussel archive it triggered that time.
I had a song book on the sheet music rack on the piano, the first time he came, it was The Band's it had a song in it called "Unfaithful Servant" I remember he left it open to that page, and I remember feeling the invasion of that, the paranoid's conversation of it, the disgusting arrogance of it, the superior comprehension it represented. It's been a steady constant thing all along. The unaddressable smugness of people and agencies that operate behind the scenes, where nothing is ever overtly stated, so nothing can ever be refuted. Cover stories, and underneath them fall-back cover stories, and underneath them still more. And should that ever get blown apart there's always violence, wet-work, elimination.
That "conversation" is what I wanted to get down here, the submission it represented to talk to them like that in that sick symbolic language as though it was my own. And that perfectly round hole in the cow's ass on the blanket on the wall showing up virtually at the same time I read about the cattle mutilations.
There's a lot more. And a spiritual context that's larger than any of the facts alone convey.

put here 11:57 PM

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