I hated Mrs Bruce in high school. She taught history in a way that didn’t work for me. She would assign a chapter for us to read, have the class copy her notes on that chapter’s subject, verbatim, and then we would be quizzed. She would lecture, but it was minimal. She stuck to the facts. She answered our questions, but there was no discussion to be had. In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Write that down. Any questions? Now: In what year did Columbus sail the ocean blue? There was very little engagement with the class, and that was my real objection to her style. While we read, wrote, and tested, she drank coffee and enjoyed her newspaper.
She wasn’t particularly fond of me either. Looking back, I don’t remember any particular confrontation with her or why I felt that she didn’t care for me, but in retrospect, I probably didn’t work very hard at masking my disdain for her. I’m sure she was simply reflecting my aggression back at me. The fact that I rarely turned my homework in probably didn’t help my cause any either. Homework? Oh, I was above that shit, man.
Just before graduation day, I calculated my grade in her class. I was failing by something like three points. Too many zeroes filled in the the spaces between the hundreds I received on her quizzes. I couldn’t graduate if I failed her class. Fuck. I was going to have to spend a summer with her smug face buried in a newspaper in front of me at her desk. She’d be all evil laughter inside of her head too, relishing my failure.
This haunted me as graduation day loomed ever closer. I let my parents buy my cap and gown for me. How could I tell them I wasn’t graduating? I went to the graduation rehearsals. I went to the parties. I couldn’t sleep at night. As much as I loathed Mrs Bruce, I knew it was my own fault. She wasn’t failing me. I had failed myself.
Report cards came out. I had a D. What?!? The dreaded Mrs Bruce had floated me some points so I could graduate. I couldn’t believe it. I went back to my grades and redid the math. I should have failed (her class, anyways, my math class grades were great). Did I miss something? A third take on my math brought on the same answer.
I wanted to take her aside and ask her, but I didn’t have the guts. The closest I got was on graduation day, standing in line with my classmates, waiting to be ushered into the ceremony. Here came Mrs Bruce along with her minion, another teacher who looked exactly like a storybook evil witch, the eater of lost children in the woods. They could oftentimes be seen huddled together in the corners of the halls, laughing maniacally, plotting the downfall of the student population, trading incantations. I called out to my nemesis, “We did it, Mrs Bruce!”
She nodded and looked to her friend. “There’s a lot of bullshit in the hall today,” commented the witch.
Fast forward a decade plus. Mrs Bruce had become a regular at the bookstore I was working at. She was retired by then, and she was genuinely enjoying that retirement. I dreaded waiting on her that first time, but I was surprised to find her a joy to talk with. She relished her free time for reading. She loved her grandchildren deeply.
I learned to appreciate history from a teacher at the same school who told us the facts along with alternate facts, possibilities, backstories, and gossip. He taught us that regardless of how you think of a person in history, they were a real live multi-dimensional human being once. They lived. I‘m glad that I got to know Mrs Bruce later on in my life. As a kid, it’s easy to see people one-dimensionally, and I could have carried on with my resentment for her if I hadn’t spent some time with her as an adult. That sincere smile in her obit picture is how I remember her from our talks at the bookstore.
See you around, Mrs Bruce. Thanks for your service to the kids of Newport. And those three points.
Listen, before you go any further, you should know that Tales of the Birdman is intended for mature audiences only. The views expressed within do not reflect the views of WordPress, Shiny Red Nothing, or myself. Read at your own risk and enjoy. Life’s too short to be offended.
Tales Of The Birdman by Wayne Bird
I: Keeping Our Vices Warm
2: The Birdman vs Loretta Lynn and the Apocalyptic Zombies
If you are reading this and you are the one who fucked my girlfriend, Sally, then I am going to kick your ass. We have decided that we will stay together despite her transgression, as this is a young relationship and it was childish revenge for a childish fight. She was mad at me for tricking her into eating pot brownies, a harmless prank by my estimation, but she found it to be evil and without thought or regard to her negative history with potheads like her parents and an ex-boyfriend. She totally flipped out. It was kind of awesome in a sick kind of way.
I should tell you that we had just made up after fighting about my previous experimentations with the drug. I promised I wouldn’t do it anymore, and, like a complete idiot, I listened to her stories of drug abuse and neglect and still thought it would be a funny prank. I figured that once she experienced getting high, it would be all rainbows and Jimi Hendrix guitar solos. No. It was more like Gone With The Wind. High drama. And we were burned like Atlanta, her crying and barely coping with paranoia. The possibility of her brain chemistry being forever altered and random piss tests at work, which had never happened before, kept her up for hours. I should tell you that I bought the pot from Bruce, who supposedly got it off a guy who smuggled it over from Hawaii and referred to it as “Hawaiian Thai-Stick.” I will neither confirm nor deny this claim, but I will say that Bruce believes that he is visited by a succubus whenever he is horny, and one time this succubus tied his hands to his wheelchair with the red shoestrings of her Doc Martins.
So, like I said, Sally was out of her mind for hours. Having only tried it five times, I am not much of authority, but I thought it was pretty killer stuff. Whatever that is worth to you. I finally managed to placate her by giving her my Moldy Peaches CD (she had already stolen it anyway) and by going out and buying her three cheeseburgers from Wendy’s. She broke up with me the next day. I found this shocking because I had not broken up with her for punching me in the face and giving me a black eye last week. Also, she cited my writing about our personal relationship in this column, and said she hated me for calling her “VD” instead of Sally in it.
Bruce threatened to introduce me to country music upon hearing my story. I was not elated by this prospect: why would I want to listen to stupid country music while trying to come down from what was possibly one of the worst days of my life? It was only a month, but I really liked Sally. I have always hated country music. My mother listened to commercial country radio constantly while I was growing up, and it made me suicidal. How can anyone with enough intelligence to brush their teeth listen to Garth Brooks or Randy Travis? I won’t even get into Toby Keith or Grethen Wilson here. It’s such drivel. Easy sentiment. Heart wrenching stories. Angels living among us.
The Christmas after my grandfather died, my mom acquired the single for Alabama’s “Angels Among Us.” The song tells a few tales of angels intervening in human matters during the verses, which I can’t remember, but the chorus is riveted to my memory. The chorus goes: “I believe there are angels among us / sent down to us from somewhere up above / they come to you and me in our darkest hour / teach us how live / show us how to give / lead us with a light of love.” These are hard points to argue with my mother when she tells me that the song reminds her of her recently deceased father.
But Bruce insists that country music is the only way to deal with a broken heart. He suggests, in between sips of his rum and Coke, that I should connect with my roots in an effort to fully appreciate the album. Not my negative experiences with my mother, but through my family tree, which, just a couple of generations ago, was growing like an old oak in the mountains of Kentucky. This is why he gives me (not lends, but gives) “Van Lear Rose” by Loretta Lynn.
I listen to it one day at work, think: “Corny,” and turn it off. I work part time on campus in a computer lab, basically just answering phones (eliminating headphones), watching over things, and answering the questions of the lab patrons. They complain about the music sometimes, but I don’t care. I don’t play the music very loud, and it’s only vaguely audible over the hum of computers and printing printers.
I was intrigued because “Van Lear Rose” was produced by Jack White, and gave it another chance on the strength of it’s song, “Portland, Oregon.” It wasn’t long before it was in heavy rotation at work, one of the ten CD’s found in my CD booklet I keep there to annoy the “lab rats,” what I call the annoying regulars who show up every day to play an online role playing game about vampires. The next song to hit me was “God Makes No Mistakes” and it’s partner, “Women’s Prison.” Here is the crazy thing: I couldn’t get over how corny it was, but I was drawn to it. First of all, the arrangement is spectacular. Besides blending a powerful southern gospel song into a country- rocker about a woman on death row, the end of “Women’s Prison” has this moment when the music dies into the ghosts or pedal steel and organ. It’s a beautiful noise and somewhere underneath Mrs. Lynn mumbles inaudibly. Then it explodes, the musical equivalent of an orgasm.
A ritual developed from it. I had to turn it off anytime I was drawn away from my desk. Interuption during either of my favorite songs disturbed me- became hard to deal with over the course of the next couple of days. I started to listen to it over and over again. The songs had begun to affect me on another level. It was Sunday Mornings at church with my grandmother back home in Indiana. It was being little and visiting my cousins in the county. It was being embarassed by my cousin Angie. It was her uncle, crying in his beer every night, listening to country music on the radio, whiskey bottle and telephone close at hand.
When I was a kid, I refused to accept that I was a hillbilly. My dad was always quick to tell me that I was, and it infuriated me every time. I wanted nothing to do with that. I was modern. I was urban. In retrospect, I realize I had loved growing up in a small town, but like any other kid in any other town, I would always claim to hate it. The people were kind and generous. They were genuine. The fact that it bore more than a passing resemblance to Mayberry, North Carolina also added charm. The mayor was my barber. I attended the grand opening of a Wal-Mart.
The album sank it’s hooks deep into the recesses of my hillbilly brain. I brought it home a few days ago to listen to it in headphones, something to help pass the recently lonely nights. I stopped off at Bruce’s to get drunk first, and he spent my entire visit talking about zombies, his obsession. He claims to think about them for at least, but not limited to, six hours a day. He dreams about them most nights. He considers scenarios in which he may have to face Mostly, he considers the weapons he will use to destroy them. I should tell you that I think he really believes in the possibility of a zombie attack at end times. So, I walked home in the middle of the night, drunk and paranoid of a zombie attack because: what if all of this war and disaster means the end times are upon us? Bruce’s words, Hawaiin Thai-Stick, and years of macaabre conditioning were freaking me out.
When I was fifteen, the conditioning was working so well that I became a Sunday School teacher. Our old one left for Florida and the only other volunteer was a sweet but illiterate lady. I was to be the man for the job until she learned to read enough to take over. This was no problem for me, as I have six younger siblings and have always known how to work with children. I was an instant hit, my group made up mostly of junior-high school aged kids.
In my last column, I told you I would tell you this story. I was doing the Sunday School thing every week for about five weeks when my cousin, Darlene, another member of the flock, accused her stepfather of molesting her. I was so disturbed by this event that I decided to take it upon myself to teach my students how to avoid sexual predators, which was not a bad idea. The bad idea was teaching them the facts of life first. The way I saw it: How can you understand one if you can’t fathom the other?
None of this is important now because Darlene made that shit up, and I’m an athiest now- at least, that’s what I was thinking while walking home from Bruce’s on that bitterly cold night, despising every cloud of breath that I exhaled. At home, I put the headphones on and pulled the covers up over my head. I listened to “Van Lear Rose” at full volume for the first, complete, uninterupted time.
I laughed at the corniness of the title track. I gave a “fuck yeah” (the official I See Sound comment of musical approval) to my favorite blue blanket as Jack and Loretta have a drunken but unregretted one night stand in “Portland, Oregon.” I come to realize that “High On A Mountaintop” could have been a hit song on the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack. I take in each and every word on the brilliantly delivered spoken word piece “Little Red Shoes.”
I had an epiphany near the end of “Women’s Prison.” At the end, when the ghosts of pedal steel and organ are lingering about and Lynn is mumbling underneath- well, she’s not mumbling. She’s quietly singing “Amazing Grace.” This realization made me cry, conjouring the image of my cousin Angie’s drunken uncle, crying in his beer to country music on the radio, waiting on his phone call. I cried myself to sleep and dreamed that I was teaching the story of Abraham and Isaac to my Sunday School class when the zombies began their attack.
Sally called me the next morning in tears. She had also went out to get drunk the night before, at a club with some friends, and had gone home with some frat boy. She awoke in the morning to find that he had already left, the mystery man passed out on the floor not willing to wake up and remind her of her lover’s name.
I forgive her, and I will honestly tell you that I have no hard feelings. At least, not any I can’t deal with rationally (except, maybe, my overwhelming hatred for that frat boy, whom I conveniently lay the blame for everything upon). I can’t tell you exactly how I can feel so serene toward’s VD after all of this, but I can, in all sincerity, tell you it was not the fear of losing her to an apocolyptic zombie attack. But that’s part of it.
I work as a professional service technician in the homes of clients. About a month ago, on the eleventh of September, I was scheduled to work for a gentleman I instantly had a sharp dislike for. I was running early that day, a rare occurrence which produces a whimsy inducing chemical in my brain, painting the world a golden hue of awesome. This so-called “gentleman” robbed me of this bliss by bluntly denying me early access to his home when I called him to politely ask for it. “I need you to arrive at your scheduled time,” he told me.
Jerk.
When I arrived to where my GPS said his house should be, I couldn’t find it. I was sure I passed it. I turned around, was sure I passed it again, turned around… I was getting stressed out. I ping-ponged back and forth in front of where I thought the house should be four times before he waved me down. He was this unkempt behemouth of a redneck, covered in tattoos, looking like he had eaten six Hell’s Angels before lunch. I was surprised to see he was wearing shoes. I was not surprised to find that he looked kind of familiar, like maybe he was an extra in The Hills Have Eyes or the Andy Griffith Show. I pulled into his drive, struggled to find an appropriate place to park my truck, and he was right at my driver’s side door as I opened it, anxious to get to work. He insisted on engaging in the most dreaded, obnoxious activity a customer can engage in.
He wanted to help.
He effortlessly moved his three tons of furniture around for me like it was made of paper towels. He talked about his work, smiling, answering my questions and asking his own, sincerely curious about my own job. He was a tattoo artist. A damn good one too; he showed me some examples of his work on his mobile phone. His specialty was black and whites, and he was a master (a fellow fan of Bernie Wrightson too). We worked together. We laughed. We got to know one another in those couple of hours I was scheduled to be there.
He told me that his boy, who I think he said was nine, had asked him about nine eleven that morning. The boy wanted to know if his dad knew about it. “I saw it happen on television,” he told his son. The boy asked if he could see it on the internet. He had agreed. His son watched it happen.
“How did he take it?” I asked.
“Very quietly,” the gentleman replied.
“A lot of people died,” the gentleman quoted his son.
He went on to tell me that years ago, he had been in a NYC barber shop while taking a vacation without his family, trying to sort out some shit he was going through. The barber had framed photos wallpapering one of his walls by a mirror. As he took a seat, the gentleman asked the old barber about them. “Are those all your customers?”
“They were,” he answered, draping the behemoth in a drop-cloth. “They sat in this very chair once. They were fireman and policeman, and they all died when the two towers came down.”
The gentleman was slow to speak for the first time since I had arrived. “I couldn’t believe it,” he told me. “I was sitting where they had sat…” We avoided eye contact. I knew he was teary. “They sacrificed themselves that day. I was sitting where they had sat. What an honor.” I was teary too.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not waving my gold-fringed American flag and shooting bottle rockets from my ass while smoking Marlboros and singing “God Bless America.” This is not about patriotism. This is about human beings coming together at a time of need and doing the right thing for each other, even at the cost of their own lives. This is about people who turned something vile into something heroic, and many of them were just doing their jobs.
This moment, these couple of hours that I spent with that gentleman on the anniversary of that late summer day in 2001, have stayed with me for the last month. I’m disappointed in myself. I’m disappointed that I judged that man who I could clearly connect with. He could be my friend. I’m surprised at myself as well; surprised that speaking of that fateful morning still brings up so much emotion in me, still brings up so much emotion even as I write this, even as I pull into my next customer’s home. It’s not my job to judge them. It’s not my job to be better than them. It’s my job to work with them, to respect their humanity, and to remember to work together towards our common goals.
Listen, before you go any further, you should know that Tales of the Birdman is intended for mature audiences only. The views expressed within do not reflect the views of WordPress, Shiny Red Nothing, or myself. Read at your own risk and enjoy. Life’s too short to be offended.
“Leave me alone/ is all that I say/ when I have nothing/ in me to give away/ a purple marten in her house/ she hollers at me/ why be inhuman/ why be like me/ like so many robins/ like so many doves/ like so many love birds/ with so many loves/ like the songs of the bobwhite/ without any words/ when we are inhuman/ we’re one with the birds”
— Will Oldham
“Homer no function beer well without.”
— Homer Simpson
Tales Of The Birdman by Wayne Bird
I: Keeping Our Vices Warm
1: The Birdman vs VD
The trick is to fry it in butter first. You get it kind of brown, kind of brownish-green really, then you add it to the mix and eggs and water or whatever, and then pour the batter into a well oiled cake pan. It’s just standard brownie baking from there, but allow a couple of hours for them to kick in. You’ll think that they aren’t going to work, but trust me, Bruce says they will.
I’m baking pot-brownies because my girlfriend punched me and burst a blood vessel in my right eye, which is nestled in a warm bed of swollen grey flesh. My friend Bruce told me that it would relieve the swelling, like with cataracts or something, but I think that sounds like bullshit. I’m only doing it because it will piss Vin Diesel off (Vin Diesel being my special lady friend- we’ll get to her in a bit). Besides, this is college. My junior year. And college is meant for this kind of stuff, right?
Bruce turns me on to crazy music. Let me tell you about him: Bruce is thirty-seven years old and a veteran of the first Gulf War. He is suffering from “Gulf War Syndrome,” among other afflictions I’m still not to clear on, and is confined to a wheelchair. He lied about his age when he applied to UC and somehow managed to get a dorm room. Two and a half years later and still no one seems to have noticed. I should also say that Bruce is kind of crazy. Maybe you’ve seen him about campus? He has long black hair and a shaggy beard, is a hippy, is usually in cheap black sunglasses, and is usually in an Ed Hall t- shirt- unless it is winter, when he’ll wear a thermal shirt or two under the Ed Hall t-shirt. He’s a sophomore now, but still has no major. He’s taking all sorts of classes in all sorts of subjects.
Bruce turned me on to The Moldy Peaches and I turned VD onto it. “Vin Diesel” is not really her name, but she just changed her major to drama, wants to be a director, and claims Fast And The Furious as her favorite movie. All I get is the finger and maybe a bruise on my arm (roughly the size of a big metal pentagram ring) for my honesty. I will see her through this, but it’s “Vin Diesel” until she switches majors.
I was telling you about The Moldy Peaches. They’re miles away from what I usually listen to, but I love them because they are retarded, and I knew that would endear VD to them. Bruce said they only had one good song, but they were worth checking out. They kind of remind me of The Vaselines, who Kurt Cobain suggested that everyone should check out way back in 1991 or earlier. Like The Vaselines, The Moldy Peaches are very lo-fi, fun, and a little naughty minded. Unlike the Scottish two-piece, the New York two-piece are really foul-mouthed. A little too much for me, but VD flipped over them.
I woke up one morning at seven AM with her sitting at her desk in her underwear, looking perfect and beautiful but for a large upside-down cross tattooed on her back between her shoulder blades- down her spine- all elaborate Celtic knot-work. Not that she’s an Irish Satanist or anything, she just thought it would be bitchin’, and I admit, seeing it there for the first time, it kind of was. The horizontal portion of the Celtic-knot-upside-down-cross runs the length of the small of her back and has Japanese markings in negative space across its middle. It’s as if the artist had placed tiny stencils of the characters over her skin and drafted the knot-work around them. Actually, I have no idea how it was done, nor will I ask, as I enjoy the mystery of the whole thing. The vertical plank of the cross begins at her neck’s beginning, slopes along with her spine, and ends just above her ass crack.
So, it’s seven in the morning and she’s blasting The Moldy Peaches from her Bose, singing along at the top of her lungs to a song about sucking cock for money.
I tell Bruce this story after English class while we get high in his Oldsmobile (which he drives using a hand accelerator and hand brake- contraptions I had never known to exist before Bruce). I tell him how much it pissed me off to be waked up like that and leave out the part about how much it turned me on. He is obviously aware of how much it must have turned me on. He gets a kick out of it and tells me that he never has to worry about getting laid, that he has a succubus named Dorothy.
You should know that girls at school don’t talk to Bruce. Every once in a while, some blonde and naive seventeen year old freshman girl will approach him out of pity (in the summer, his chicken bones climbing out of his cut off camo shorts- ending in flip-flops at the wheelchair’s foot rests. In July, his toe- nails were painted royal purple, and he had talked VD into painting perfect yellow smiley faces onto his big toes’ nails). He hits on these poor girls in spectacularly inappropriate ways. “Thank God for sending me a sweet young little girl like you. I haven’t made love to a woman since shrapnel took my prostate, and I have been praying to Mary and Jesus every night for you.” Oh, I forgot to say that before he said that, he had taken the hand of this innocent miss to admire her High School class ring. He stared her in the eye with sincere intensity, a hint of a smile creasing his cheeks. Mostly, word has spread, and girls make wide circles around him to keep away. That’s the way he wants it, I suppose.
But none of this is important, because Bruce has a succubus named Dorothy. He tells me she is very short, 5’3 or so, and has shoulder length black hair that is always styled differently. She consistently looks amazing. He emphasizes this with various hand motions and signals and adjectives I’ve never used and I expect are invented. Once, he wanted a redhead and Dorothy showed up as a redhead. She was like that, somehow able to know what he was going to be in the mood for when she arrived. And had she always had those freckles, those freckles like any natural redhead would have? They were slight. Perhaps they had always been there and she was a natural redhead and he had just never noticed. He was on a lot of medication after all. But, still, her pubic hair was black as an AC/DC album cover. If the question would be: how much blacker can they be? The answer would be: none. She had been visiting him ever since the army had moved him to an Ohio VA Hospital after the war.
You should know that we got really stoned while Bruce told me about his succubus in his car around the corner from Chipotle. I’m new to marijuana and never would have considered it in High School. I went to church every Sunday morning until my senior year (some time I’ll tell you about the time I taught the birds and the bees to a junior high school aged Sunday School class). Anyways, pot is new for me, and is yet another thing Bruce introduced me to. I had never talked to VD about it because it had yet to come up in our month long relationship. Neither of us have ever really even drank, but, like I said, I believe that this time to try new things. We have discussed this. She agrees. She wants to try new things too. You can imagine my surprise when she absolutely flips out upon seeing me after Bruce drops me off at her apartment.
Her parents are potheads. Her ex-boyfriend, not the one she broke up with six months ago and not the four year relationship before that where the boy broke her nose because he thought her jeans were too slutty, but the boyfriend before that. Tommy. He was a pothead and prioritized Final Fantasy video games and his bong (which he called “The Incredible Hulk”) over her. I am not open minded, but stupid, and that giant freckle/mole on my right side is probably cancer.
I’m all: fuck, honey, darlin’, I’m sorry this is fun and harmless and you should try it and you look so pretty today and how was class. And, apparently, she feels that I should be violated in a violent sort of way with a grilling utensil and now my “My Chemical Romance” CD is broken in half because she hates it and I’m an asshole.
I was so ridiculously pissed that I went directly to Bruce’s dorm room to listen to old Velvet Underground records, original first pressings you should know, and to get his recipe for pot brownies. He introduced me to Zima as well. This was not the first time I tried one, but the last time it was just one. This time it was seven. And three rum and Cokes.
So, I walk all the way back to VD’s apartment in Covington, Bruce’s Gulf War army helmet, stolen from his closet after he had passed out, strapped firmly to my chin. I make a stop at Blockbuster, a retailer known for it’s disaproval of helmets, to buy up all the Vin Diesel movies I can find and an assistant manager follows my every stumble until I check out and leave. I bust into VD’s unlocked apartment singing that Moldy Peaches song about sucking cock for money and declare that we will have a movie marathon prior to shaving her head to look Vin Diesel. With any luck, it would come back black, just like Dorothy The Sucubus’s hair.
The doctor said that her punch was not as bad as I was making it out to be, and her pentagram ring had only busted a small blood vessel and it was no big deal. Black eye and all, it should be healed up in a few days or so. Meantime, I’m packing for Thanksgiving, and calling Sally “VD” in this column to piss her off and get some revenge. Also, I am making these brownies, which I will trick her into eating.
I should tell you before closing that if you see Bruce about campus or in his dorm building, you should ask him about his sucubus, as he loves the idea of having his life published for entertainment value. Do so at your own risk, though.
Recently, there was a consumer and media backlash against the retailer Urban Outfitters. Their website had briefly promoted a Kent State garment that appeared to be blood-splattered, an apparently morbid reference to the massacre of student protesters at the university by the National Guard in 1970. The retailer feigned ignorance, saying it was a misunderstanding. The shirt was vintage and fading, they said. This was all a trick of the eye. Sure it was. They took the item down, and only one question was left behind: Who would buy such a thing, let alone wear it?
Wayne Bird would.
Wayne has always had a sense of humor all his own, with the driving idea behind it being that if it’s uncomfortable for you, it’s funny for him. This is not sadism. Wayne’s actually a sensitive, compassionate guy. He simply believes in confronting and challenging that which keeps us… In society’s neat little box. Bird questions everything, and he tries real hard to have a laugh over it, no matter how bad things get. Laughter, after all, is the best drug.
Wayne knows a thing or two about drugs.
Maybe I’m being unfair.
I met the Birdman back in 2005(?) when he was attending the University of Cincinnati and interning for the pop culture website I See Sound, which I also worked for. We had a lot in common besides our mutual passion for writing: indie rock, comic books, music, friends, and The Power of Myth. We were fast friends. I loved the guy like a brother. I’m so glad he never wrote about me.
See, Wayne wrote about his life through the lens of the pop culture that he loved, and these writings took him through a very difficult year. He wrote some of the most fucked up stories I’ve ever read. Stories that still disturb me when I think of them nearly a decade after I read them.
When I caught up with him on Facebook recently, I told him this. This elated the man, but he told me that his story was never published in completion. I See Sound had gone defunct before his last two submissions could run. He saw Tales of the Birdman as a book with a beginning, middle, and an end, but the conclusion never saw the Internet’s soft glowing light. His faithful readers were left dangling. This still bums him out.
So, I told him I would republish it here.
Listen, before you go any further, you should know that Tales of the Birdman is intended for mature audiences only. The views expressed within do not reflect the views of WordPress, Shiny Red Nothing, or myself. Read at your own risk and enjoy. Life’s too short to be offended.
Tales of the Birdman is episodic, with every three stories working together as a trilogy and all of those trilogies working torwards a grander narrative. The point here being that you don’t have to read the whole manual in order to use the machine.
You’ve been releasing albums as For Algernon (starting with Orange Watches and Lost loves, if I remember correctly) since… What? 2002? 2003?How many have there been?
2003. There are 7 for algernon albums out there.
Why isn’t this a For Algernon album? What does M. Moncrieff mean? Is this a character you wanted to play, a new personal direction, or something else?
It’s not a for algernon record because for algernon has evolved into a band with multiple personalities. We were nearly 50-60% complete on a new record at the time of the wreck and then we all sort of went through some life changing events. Deaths, births, wrecks… The album was left in limbo. As I began writing, I kept fleshing out these new songs on my own, without the bands input, and that’s not what I wanted the next algernon record to be. We all had worked too hard and too long to just skip it, move on and come back to it. The name comes from (1/2 of where for algernon came from) Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance if Being Earnest.” One of the lead characters is Monsieur Algernon Moncrieff.
The M. Moncrieff album liner notes talk about a car crash and a move to the country. What happened? Why were these such life altering events?
Driving home, a car pulled out in front of me, and as I swerved to avoid it, I lost control and hit a parked car. It was a pretty serious wreck. I cracked my sternum and broke 3 ribs, burns from the airbags, concussion and my passenger was injured severely too. The wreck still plays out in my mind, in nightmares, when I’m driving… I just keep thinking of how close I came to dying or killing someone. I blacked out after the impact to the head, so I can’t remember anything up until after I woke up, and that makes it worse. A near death experience will rattle you. It’s how you deal with it that makes or breaks you, and it broke me. After about a month or two, a series of events lead me to a move 75 minutes east of Cincinnati. The closest store is 35 minutes away. It was a huge adjustment from what I knew. It’s taught me to prioritize and the beauty of silence. Often I would go a day or two without speaking a word. Finally, I began writing as a way to heal.
Will you play shows as Monsieur Moncrieff or will For Algernon perform these songs?
I’ve been playing Moncrieff stuff when I play solo. I doubt algernon will play them. It’s not out of the picture, but it wasn’t developed for that.
It seems to me that this album is a transition into adulthood for you. Is this a correct observation? Did this happen in your life and music at the same time?
I’ve been slowly adjusting to adulthood these past few years, and I don’t think I was really comfortable with where I was at till a year after the move. I didn’t plan on these songs to be that per say, but I guess it kind of is. The first song really sums it up for me these days. I’ve had some rough times, good times, I love music, I love writing & singing about it, I may get lost in it, I love my friends but what I really love most is coming home to someone at the end of it all and I don’t care how lame that may sound. I guess that’s an “adult” thing?
All but two of your albums have been self recorded, and they all have a lo-fi vibe. This one’s no different, but it feels even more raw and performance oriented than some of your others. Was this intentional? What kind of a sound were you going for? How does this sound differ from what you would have done if this were a set of For Algernon recordings?
That’s funny you say that because I was doing a lot of lo-fi tricks, but this album was huge. The biggest undertaking I’ve done. I used various recording methods, studied different ways to capture vocals, found that it’s fun to slow things down on a reel to reel, and played more things than I ever have. I really took my time on it. Not that it sounds like a big studio record but that was intentional. I only recorded vocals when I was in the mood of the song, and I would try them drunk, sober, half asleep, with strep throat… I would record the song in different tempos and melodies and build on the one that captured the essence of the song the most. I wanted it to be a very organic but warm sounding record, and the songs to work just as well acoustic or with full instrumentation as on the record.
Compared to what the forthcoming algernon record is, it’s not even close. Jon Williams is producing it, and he is a wizard. Had this been recorded as for algernon today, it would be a very different album. I doubt the same songs would even be on it. Even if it was pre-Jon, I still would’ve had other people play parts. I guess the beauty/fault of me doing it on my own is that I hear what I want, but struggle to actually get it out, so I think you hear the struggle in the music. The guitar solo in “arrow” took me 3 painful hours to do because I doubled it on acoustic and electric and couldn’t remember the notes, and i think that comes across in the recording. Had this been for algernon, I would’ve said, “Hey, Jon. What do you think goes here?”
What bands/artists were you listening to while writing/recording “At the Lake, Just After Dark?”
Primarily, I was obsessed with Ólafur Arnalds and Max Richter, but there was a little Woodpigeon, Sparklehorse, Tom Waits, The Antlers, Ape The Ghost, Adam Green & Binki Shapiro, Lee Hazlewood, Lucinda Williams and Dean Martin
The liner notes also talk about the possibility of you abandoning making music altogether. Knowing you as I do, this sounds impossible. Why would you consider leaving your recording gear behind you? Are you still considering it?
Yeah. Music is so personal to me. It gets tougher and tougher to go out and play. You do so much work and hustling to get a show together and then two people show up and tell you to keep it down so they can hear each other talk. You tell yourself it doesn’t matter, and you’re doing this because you love it, but I can love it just as much sitting in my studio and not go through all the heartbreak of a terrible gig. But then, you get that great show and I eat all my words.
You’ve written hundreds of songs. Which is your favorite and why?
Seriously? I can’t pick one. It’s like picking your favorite child.
If you’re an avid music fan, you may know that the Cincinnati area has had a firm finger in the piano lid of rock and roll history for a long time. If you’re kind of obsessed with indie music in particular, you’ll probably name-drop the phenomenal Heartless Bastards or the fucking awful Afghan Whigs. Maybe you’re obsessed. Perhaps you own a Wussy t-shirt or know where Coltrane Motion used to eat chili. In that case, Jason Wells is probably your hero.
Believe it or not, this is the least douchey photo I could find on Jason’s Facebook page.
I met Wells ages ago. We were at an open mic, and he was pacing back and forth in a hall perpendicular to the bar, an electric guitar hanging on his back. He was a tortured soul, looking (oh-wee-oh) just like Buddy Holly. I don’t recall what broke the ice, but I taught him how to play “About A Girl” by Nirvana that night, and it wasn’t long after that that we started a band called “The Drunken Monkeys” with Rich Lewis, later of The Lewis Brothers. This was 2001. A Jason Wells solo record, called Public Diary, came along shortly after, and a parade of excellent, self-produced/released albums under the name For Algernon marched on through the years afterwards.
This album is about an escaped prisoner with a hook for a hand.
Calling For Algernon a “band” is a loose descriptor. See, the members have consisted of Wells and whoever else was able, willing, patient, and available within Wells’ notoriously ever-changing parameters. There have been a diverse troupe of talented players involved in the decade-plus existence of the group, but the thing to know here is that it was always Wells’ show, and Wells’ show was mostly an insular, obsessively crafted, recorded one. “Public Diary” was the most apt of names for his first record. All of the assemblies of recordings to come have been public diaries as well, with each being a little better than the last. The hook was always Wells’ impeccable pop craft, his ability to casually shake off a melody that lodged itself in the crevice where your brain meets your heart, where we take comfort in the companionship of shared human suffering. It was only relatively recently that Wells seemed to have settled on, more or less, a live band line up. Like many past incarnations, they were a dynamic emotional force. Unlike the past line-ups, this one was pretty tight.
Every one of these guys has a third nipple.
Then Wells crashed his car. Again. Then he moved. Again (this time to “the country”). The charismatic Mr. Wells found himself at the elbow of his personal trajectory.
Enter M. Moncrieff, Wells’ first album under this alternative moniker. “Near the Lake, Just After Dark,” continues the tradition established with the For Algernon code name. The songs are self-recorded, lo-fi ditties that sit you on the floor next to Wells’ production desk while he pours his heart out to you with a cheap but drinkable bottle of scotch. The striking difference here; the element that sets it apart from his previous work, is the contentment it expresses. My favorite track is the opener, “An Ounce Of Honey,” an ode to coming home to the one you love and forming lasting, resentment free bonds.
This is not the sad bastard output of a youthful artist. “Near the Lake” finds Wells settling into himself as a confident adult, somewhat at ease, with the dramatic hinge of the album being the struggle to accept the transformation. The track “Hard Heart,” easily the album’s most accessible and catchy tune, is a great example of this evolution. The titular hard heart of this song has hurt our narrator, but instead of pacing the dark halls of his broken heart, Wells stands proud to say that he’s had enough of her shit. A similar sentiment is given in the scathing admonishment called “Board Games,” where some poor fool is eviscerated in a fashion that’d make Bob Dylan proud.This newfound confidence could, perhaps, be a fitting enough reason to change one’s name.
It’s difficult for me to place M. Moncrieff musically. I’ve been listening to For Algernon for so long that it is it’s own beast to me. Upon the first listen, it sounds like a For Algernon album. Cool, but whatever, man. Then I listen again… And again… You may site Elliot Smith as an influence, as folks often might, if you’d please. Maybe Grandaddy. I would, however, put this record in the hall of heroes with the Velvet Underground circa Loaded, early Belle and Sebastian, and Lou Barlow with dry eyes. It doesn’t sound like those bands exactly, but they’d all get along fine at the dinner party as long as that scotch was drinkable enough.
The production value is best described as homemade. Homemade with a weary passion, a trait that really stands out the most in the sleepy vocals of “4 Seasons,” one of those tracks that exists like a contented sigh from an alright dude with a less than alright half-full bottle of…
…Well, the scotch is probably gone by now, but I bet there’s some Jameson around here somewhere. There’s a pot of grandpa’s chili on the stove too. Help yourself. Cheers. Here’s to history.
Shiny Red Nothing 