A Tale of My Experiences with the Astrophysical Anomaly Referred to as an Aleph; or The Horrors of Unspeakable Evil (part one)

Here is part one of my Halloween story. As you will see, it is quite different from Micah's tale, but I hope it is equally as enjoyable to you. This story is quite a bit longer (and not nearly as concise). It will likely be spread out over 5 or 6 parts, so beware for those of you who hate serials (Gish, I'm looking in your direction.)

Oh and enjoy. If any of you other Springfield bloggers would be interested, write your own Halloween tales. Might be a fun way for us to make this Halloween in the blogosphere unique.

A Tale of My Experiences with the Astrophysical Anomaly Referred to as an Aleph; or The Horrors of Unspeakable Evil

Jorge Louis Borges was not fucking around when he wrote about seeing an aleph. He got it right. He saw. He saw. I have no doubt about that. There’s just no way he could have made up that story and gotten it so right.

I have an aleph. I’ve looked into it hundreds, thousands of times. And you might not believe me, but it is not just a random point in space like Borges'. No, my aleph exists inside of me. There are other alephs out there, but mine’s the only one I know of that lives inside of a person.

You probably wouldn’t like me very much if you got to know me. I’ve always had this problem that I have no level of intolerance of scumbags or assholes or people of a generally foul demeanor. It’s not even so much that I put up with them, but that I attract them. And then I put up with them. These people have a tendency to rub off on me, and I find myself time and time again looking around and wondering what the hell I’m doing here.

It’s always hard to start a story like this. It’s always been hard for me to start stories in general. In books you read, it seems like everything starts cleanly. Chapters start and end cleanly. The story ends cleanly. In real life, though, nothing is clean. Nothing starts cleanly, and nothing sure as hell ever ends that way.

So, I’ll start here. His name was Johnny Tremain.

I’m not kidding, and I’m not making this name up to protect the identity of an innocent man. His name was Johnny Tremain, and he was anything but innocent.

Johnny Tremain was, I am convinced, a truly mad person. By mad, I mean insane. Totally and utterly insane. He was a madman and should never have been trusted on the streets. He was insane in just about everything he did. His entire life was a tangle of juxtapositions and contrasts.

When I first met him, he had shoulder-length hair, and a big, bushy beard and he reeked of garlic. This was because he ate a bag of raw garlic cloves every day. He carried them with him as he worked, and he ate the cloves raw, like they were little white apples, picking and sucking pieces of skin out of his teeth. Johnny thought the raw garlic was good for his immune system; said he’d had a college professor once who had lived vigorously to ripe old age and that it was all because of raw garlic.

Johnny also smelled because he rarely bathed, but the garlic helped to cover the dirty odor. He looked like he smelled, and everywhere we went together, people stared and grimaced at his scent. They could see him coming, and they knew it wasn’t going to be good. I remember reading once that American colonists could smell slave ships coming in from the sea well before they could see them. This was the basic gist of Johnny’s smell. You could always smell him before you could see him.

Johnny looked and smelled like a bum, but he was one of the most well-read men I’ve ever met. He could quote equally well from the works of Jane Austen and Charles Bukowski, although I think he always favored Bukowski. Johnny loved to read books, but he hated reading current events. He refused to read newspapers, and he refused to watch the news. He only listened to the radio during the afternoon when NPR’s Performance Today was on. He loved classical music.

Johnny went through phases. One day I showed up for work, and he had completely shaved his head, and trimmed his beard into a long Asian-style Fu-Manchu. He looked like something out of an old Bruce Lee movie. The American trucker turned karate ass-kicker.

For awhile, he refused to grow eyebrows. He shaved them every day before work and sometimes he would nick himself and they’d be scabby and red.

He collected tattoos like little boys collect baseball cards. His back and arms were covered in skulls and slogans about hard living and fast, easy women. Obsessed with push-ups, Johnny would stop numerous times throughout the work day and just crack out a couple hundred pushups. At first, I’d just sit there waiting for him to finish. Eventually, I started carrying an apple with me, and when Johnny dropped and started pumping out reps, I’d sit, gnawing on an apple and enjoying a short break.

I worked for Johnny for almost two years. It was the worst time of my life. I’ve always wanted to be a writer, but I never really knew how. I read the covers off of Billy Burroughs’ autobiographical novels when I was younger, and I got it in my head that I could pump myself full of booze and meth, and I could go out into the world and all these things would happen, and I’d be able to write them out and become a rock star.

In fact, I pumped myself full of booze and meth, and I didn’t give a shit about the writing any more. All I cared about was getting high, staying high. Whatever it took to stay high, I'd do it. And I did some awful, terrible things. Just horrifying things for drugs.

Ultimately, though, I wound up sick, stabbed, lovestarved, broke, and eventually jailed. After a stint in prison, I didn’t have a lot left open to me in this wide world. I looked and looked for jobs, starting with semi-professional work. Then I looked at retail. Then I tried to find a sales job. No one wanted to hire me . . . so, when I got the chance to work with Johnny, I took it.