Lucius Shepard

[cranefly]

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/ma...us-shepard

So long, Skipper.
--li'l buddy

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

I read a notice about his passing in the Borderlands Bookstore newsletter, but I don't know him or his work. Could you tell me what I should know about him?

[Drunk Monk]

I remember you speaking highly of him, CF.

[cranefly]

I first met Lucius Shepard in 1980. That was before he became a name. We’d both made the cut for Clarion that year, a six-week intensive science fiction writing workshop held at Michigan State in East Lansing. In all, there were 19 of us from different walks of life. At our first gathering, Lucius did not impress. He was a monstrous slob of a man, shoddy in dress, with straggly hair and unkempt beard; and his fragmented speech (“Hey, man, you know, like...”) promised little in the way of prose. But soon after he submitted his first story, we realized he was a major talent.

As it turned out, he and I were suite-mates (our adjoining dorm rooms shared a bathroom). Though complete opposites (I was neat, he was a slob; I was quiet and reserved, he was loud and gregarious), we got along great. I’m not entirely certain why. He’d kid me a lot, abuse me in good-natured ways, such as stuffing me butt-first into garbage cans. He stood 6’ 3” and topped 300 pounds, while I was 5’ 9” and barely tipped 125. I was the Gulligan to his Skipper, and he’d often call me Li’l Buddy.

Six instructors (all professional writers) taught the workshop, each for one week. The final two were Kate Wilhelm and Damon Knight, a husband-and-wife team who had founded the long-running Clarion workshop. We’d meet in the mornings to workshop stories and listen to lectures. The rest of the time was ours to write. But no one could spend all that time at their typewriter, and as the workshop wore on, we partied more and more. More often than not, Lucius was at our center. He had so much charisma. Besides his writing, he was a talented musician. Armed with a guitar and a deep resounding voice, he drew us like the Pied Piper. Still, now and then he pulled back from the group, confiding in me that he was not comfortable taking so much control.

Lucius sometimes got out of hand with the kidding and pranks. One time, while sipping a beer at a party, he casually noticed a lady workshopper in a nice dress standing close by. She had her back turned, busy talking to someone. As I watched, he tipped some beer down the back of her dress. He did it without thinking, just spur-of-the-moment. Shocked and furious, she told him off and stormed away, leaving him wondering what he’d done. As for me, how many trash cans did I need to be stuffed into? And did he have to hide my food in the cafeteria every time I looked away?

He was always walking through the connecting bathroom into my room to see what I was up to. My calendar was an endless source of amusement for him. He found it incredible that someone would actually schedule things. So one day I jotted an entry for the following week that read, “Kill Lucius.” It didn’t take him long to notice. “What’s this about? You’re going to kill me?” He seemed genuinely perturbed that I would make such a joke. Later that same day, he came into my room and asked if I’d checked my calendar lately. I said no. “I think you should check your calendar,” he pressed. So I did. He’d written, “Kill Cranefly,” on the day before I was to kill him.

I’ve depicted Lucius as an impulsive and undisciplined goof-off, and he was; but he was also profoundly and worldly wise. While I was a product of Indiana with its Republican mindset and believed in the good ole US of A, Lucius had travelled extensively and experienced the reality around the globe. Cynical and contemptuous of politics here and abroad, he was street-wise, jail-wise, third-world-country-wise, aware of how the world really worked, and how, on pretext of doing good, governments exploited the poor and disadvantaged at almost every turn.

He had a deep resentment and contempt for authority and the status quo. He would denigrate or damage things for no apparent reason. He once wrecked an elevator’s ceiling grid while we were in it. When finished eating in the cafeteria, he’d often toss the silverware in the trash along with scraps. He seemed to despise the American way of life, or at least the propaganda machine that would have us believe we were morally and ethically superior to anyone else.

Lucius trusted me enough to share some very personal things. Of his upbringing, he told how his scholarly father would take him out on long walks in the Virginia countryside, and upon their return would pose, “Now, Lucius, tell me what you saw.” Lucius would have to give a very detailed accounting. I envied him this writerly training at so young an age. But there was a dark side to his childhood, one full of abuses, which came to a head when, at age 14, he sat down to dinner with his parents and woke up strapped down in the back of a van. His parents, deeming him uncontrollable as he got involved in drugs and rock music, had him institutionalized. It took Lucius three months to convince an aunt that he wasn’t crazy. Assuming the role of guardian to get him out, she raised him thereafter.

Lucius joined a succession of rock bands, acting as lead singer, songwriter and guitarist. One of them even played warm-up for The Band, but proved too overpowering (making The Band sound tinker-toyish) and lost that gig. He claimed that Bob Seger had stolen one of his songs, and he had a lawsuit pending against him. He told of a performance in a seedy bar where the drummer kept ogling a motorcycle chick. Lucius warned him time and again to stop, then fled the bar as the motorcycle gang charged the stage to break the drummer’s hand. As for drugs, Lucius would try anything handed to him. He once walked out of a drug deal gone bad where someone was about to have his face pressed against a red-hot stove burner. He’d also travelled the world and was brimming with anecdotes about South and Central America and other exotic places. Lucius made me aware of how little I’d lived.

Our writing styles were very different. While my stories were inventive, plot-driven, and minimally descriptive, his were all about setting and atmosphere, rich in figurative language. He seemed to have a fair amount of respect for what I was doing, while I was in awe of what he could do.

Lucius was the big discovery at Clarion that year. Instructors praised his writing and encouraged him to pursue it as a career. One told him to stop wasting his time in the science fiction gutter and write mainstream. Lucius was euphoric at all the attention. But midway through the workshop things got complicated. Though married, he became involved with another workshopper I’ll call Lady X. Doe-eyed, raven-haired, six feet tall, she was a knockout. She was also married. One morning her husband walked in on them unannounced. Lucius’s wife soon knew the score as well.

The last two weeks of Clarion turned hellish for Lucius. He couldn’t write, couldn’t sleep. He was doing more drugs than usual. He confided in me a growing concern for his own sanity, because he’d begun to hallucinate. In particular, he kept seeing eyes floating about in the air. The morning after he told me this, I was up early and typing away at my desk when he entered through the adjoining bathroom. Coming up behind me, he slapped his big palms down on my shoulders. “Hey, Li’l Buddy. How’s it going?” “Not bad,” I said, still typing away. He kneaded my shoulders a bit, then inched them closer to my neck. “Did you put those fucking eyes up on my ceiling?” I had spent the evening before drawing up a bunch of eyes, then carefully cutting them out. When Lucius stepped out of his room, I’d gone over, climbed up on his desk, and carefully taped the eyes to the upper wall and ceiling. In hindsight, it had been a terribly insensitive act. When I admitted that I might have done it, Lucius shouted, “Jesus fucking Christ!” and mock-choked me. That morning he had been in a very difficult phone conversation with his wife when he leaned back in his desk chair and stopped in mid-sentence, seeing eyes.

One writing teacher at Clarion -- I believe it was Algys Budrys -- lectured us that succeeding as a writer has less to do with talent than with being good at nothing else. That upset me. I knew I had talent, and wanted to believe it would lead to writing success. But in hindsight Budrys was spot on. Writing is such a difficult profession -- requiring so much self-discipline -- that if you have any other profession to fall back on, you’re apt to settle for that. Of all of us at Clarion that year, Lucius came closest to being good at nothing else. A 9-to-5 job seemed inconceivable to him. He would not, or could not, do it. That made his writing a sink-or-swim proposition.

After Clarion, I returned to my software programming job in Paoli, PA. Meanwhile, Lucius pursued writing as a profession -- second only to his pursuit of Lady X. Most in our workshop thought he and Lady X would hitch up. They had been so passionately involved at Clarion and seemed the perfect beauty-beast match. Some felt they were destined to become the next Damon and Kate, who had long served as father/mother figures for fledgling science fiction writers. But while Lucius was quick to finalize his divorce, Lady X began to have second thoughts about ending her own marriage. Just as opportunity was shining brightly on Lucius, he was stricken with unrequited love; and this gaping mental wound would persist -- and permeate his writing -- through a good part of his life.

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

Thank you, CF.

[cranefly]

Two months after Clarion, Lucius paid me a visit. He stayed a couple days, as I recall. His eyeglasses were broken. He had patched them with masking tape, but they kept falling apart. I asked him what had happened. “Shiriken,” he said. Thus began his tale of the Kung Fu Hillbillies. Southern lowbrows who had migrated north into the Ann Arbor area, they had learned martial arts without benefit of a sifu. Their training consisted of slugging it out with each other. As a result, they had very few teeth and even less sense. They believed the end times were near and had converted a cellar into a survival shelter. Lucius said it was pathetic; their food stores were infested with rats. Anyway, the Kung Fu Hillbillies somehow rationalized a need for lots of music equipment after the fall of civilization, so they had stolen stage-show equipment from a warehouse belonging to one of Lucius’ friends. Lucius got together with some friends and they paid the Kung Fu Hillbillies a visit. As they broke through the door, one Hillbilly flung a throwing star that broke Lucius’ glasses. “They were crazy!” Lucius told me. “They were going to fight us? We had fucking guns!” They managed to get the equipment back without firing a shot.

During his stay, Lucius wanted to go to a bar. That’s not my routine, but I found one nearby. As we sat there on barstools, he quietly made observations. He liked to listen in, catch tantalizing fragments of conversation which he would later work into story dialog. Seeing a man strike up a conversation with a couple seated nearby, Lucius predicted that in three hours time the guys would be fighting over something said about the woman. Bars are a microcosm of life, he told me. In one night, one sees the life and death of relationships and all that comes between. At one point he chuckled and whispered to me that the bar had another business going on upstairs. I didn’t understand. He asked if I’d noticed the occasional man entering and going straight upstairs. Now watching, I saw a man do just that. The restrooms must be upstairs, I said. Lucius pointed to the restrooms downstairs. As we left, he roared with laughter, amused that I was clueless about a whorehouse virtually in my backyard.

I took Lucius to the Blob Theater (the one used in The Blob) in Phoenixville. We watched a horror movie that used a lot of jump-out-at-you shots. To my surprise, Lucius kept jumping out of his seat, sometimes with an audible yelp. Rattled, he whispered to me that he knew it was just a movie and he knew exactly what they were doing, but it still got to him every time. “If this keeps up,” he told me, “I’m going to have to leave the theater.”

Throughout his stay, Lucius made frequent mention of Lady X. While his own divorce was in the works, Lady X seemed to be dragging her feet. She felt insecure, he said. He needed to publish some stuff to give her the security she needed. Lucius seemed fairly level-headed talking about Lady X, though now and then I sensed a swirl of emotions.

Before leaving, Lucius made clear he had come with a purpose. He was thinking of moving to Eugene, Oregon. That’s where Kate and Damon lived, and it was known to have a healthy writer community. The thing was, Lucius wanted me to come along. Let’s share an apartment out there, he said, and we’ll both make it as writers. He praised my writing, assured me my stuff was bound to sell, and said that Kate and Damon would be very supportive of our efforts. He made quite the sales pitch out of it.

Dropping him off at the airport, I promised to give it some thought.

But it was unreasonable, unworkable. My manager had been very generous in giving me a six-week leave to attend Clarion. Now the project was at a crucial stage. I was working on the BSP (Burroughs Scientific Processor), the world’s fastest supercomputer at that time. I needed to help finish the input/output subsystem. No, I wasn’t a major player on the project. I’d started out a lowly data clerk and recently been promoted to junior software programmer. But this was a crucial embryonic stage in my career. My BA in the Independent Learning Program had proved worthless in the job market; but here, at Burroughs, I had lucked into the beginnings of a professional career.

It had been unfair of Lucius to even ask such a thing of me.

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

I want to see the screenplay fro Kung Fu Hillbillies.

[cranefly]

So I quit my job, hopped in my car, drove to Ann Arbor to pick up Lucius, and we set off, headed for Shangri-La, in the guise of Eugene, Oregon.

Looking back, it’s hard to believe I did it. Why would I give up the beginnings of a decent career for such an insane venture? Granted, the BSP project was showing signs of trouble. Burroughs kept cutting our budget. With low morale and lower pay, programmers were leaving in a steady stream for Silicon Valley. When our manager was blamed for missed deadlines that were the company’s fault, he quit as well. His replacement turned out to be a pompous Napoleon type no one liked.

Still, that hardly begins to explain it. Clarion had been an inspiration, and Lucius was giving me further encouragement. Though several instructors at Clarion had issued warnings to the class not to quit our day jobs -- because writing as a profession takes time, and during that time you’ll need a source of income -- I didn’t want to believe it applied to me. I was overconfident, too full of myself.

There was one other aspect to my decision. Lucius, who lived in Ann Arbor, kept visiting Lady X in northern Indiana. On a recent visit he had clashed with the husband, tossing him onto the hood of a car. The threat of real physical violence was growing. Most people familiar with the situation felt Lucius needed a cooling off period, best accomplished by moving further away. A couple of Clarionites told me I’d be doing a good deed by taking him to Eugene.

Why didn’t Lucius just go it alone? For a world traveler, he was surprisingly needy. He would need a means of transportation in Eugene because he didn’t drive (when I asked why, he mimed steering a car, pointed aside and exclaimed, “Look! Corn!” then made a crashing sound). With his limited finances, he’d have to share an apartment, and felt very comfortable around me. After all, we had gotten along great at Clarion, and we both hoped this could be made a continuation of that workshop.

While I’d packed most of my belongings in the car, Lucius travelled light, bringing just a garbage bag stuffed with a few clothes, his guitar, and a large cow skull. Within minutes the passenger seat was wrecked. Big and awkward, he couldn’t find the lever to move the seat back, so he just forced it with a metal stripping noise. Even with it all the way back, he didn’t have enough leg room.

We dipped down into northern Indiana so he could have a secret rendezvous with Lady X to say goodbye, then off we went, taking a circuitous route, hitting Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon and other Indian ruins, Albuquerque, across Death Valley, up through the San Francisco Bay Area and ever northward. It was a crazy trip. Lucius was unstable beyond belief, depressed, furious, unpredictable in his moods. There were moments when he would think out loud, “What am I doing? What the fuck am I doing moving away from her?” At others, after long brooding silences, he would pound the dash and shout, “I’m going to kill that M-F! So help me, I’ll kill him!”

It would make for an interesting psychological experiment to take two people who are complete opposites and pack them into cramped quarters for a week to see what happens. That was us. Lucius smoked nonstop. What I liked on the radio he invariably hated. If I stopped at a vista point, he had no interest in it. He’d laugh at my naiveté time and again, when, in a restaurant, I ordered fish and got godawful fishsticks (“What did you expect? We’re in the middle of the fucking desert!”), or when, at a gas station in a dusty town in Arizona, I asked an itinerant for directions, and he blathered something useless and then begged five bucks off me (“That was great. You paid him more than you did for the gas!”). Lucius was a seasoned traveler. He knew all the traps and pitfalls; I was a sucker just waiting to happen.

Midway through our trip, he got it in his head we should forget about Eugene and instead turn south, driving all the way to South America. I persuaded him we should continue on to Eugene. It was my car, after all. And, to be honest, it was mostly my money.

Who knows what drugs he was taking along the way. At one point he started shouting, “No! No! Turn, turn, turn!” thinking I was headed for a concrete buttress at an underpass. But I was wide awake and going straight down the highway, and fortunately he didn’t grab the wheel.

No cross-country trip with a drug-addled psychotic genius would be complete without a stopover in Las Vegas. A Clarionite living there had kindly offered to put us up for a day or two with her family. She took us out to dinner at a club. The entertainment was a standup comic who told incredibly distasteful sexist jokes. Lucius began to laugh hysterically and threatened time and again to climb up on stage and punch the guy out. We tried to calm him. He’d ordered fish but wasn’t hungry, so midway through the act he ducked the whole fish under the table and smashed it upward. It stuck to the underside of the table, bringing on maniacal laughter. We dragged him out of there.

As our friend drove us down the Strip back to her place, Lucius pretended to shoot other drivers with his hand. Our friend ordered him to stop, because Vegas wasn’t the place for that, people were routinely found shot dead in vacant lots. Finally we said our goodbyes and left Vegas. Onward, sweeping upward, to Eugene, Oregon.

We lit on Kate and Damon’s doorstep late one evening. They had heard of our epic journey through the grapevine and welcomed us in. As they asked us about the trip, I settled on the living room floor. When it came time for us to retire to their spare bedroom, Kate and Damon watched me with some concern as it took me three tries to get up. I was totally exhausted.

It turned out that we had come at a very bad time. Kate was having a medical emergency. Not that they let on. Damon was gracious as ever, and while Kate vanished for a spell, he put us up until we found an apartment. Only after Kate had pulled through just fine did they tell us.

[Drunk Monk]

especially the cow skull

[cranefly]

Lucius and I stood in an antique shop in downtown Eugene, transfixed by the diorama of a taxidermied cobra and mongoose locked in combat. While these days a web search turns these up by the score (are there factories around the globe churning them out?), at that time, to us, it was truly unique and way cool. The only difference between our reactions was that Lucius wanted to buy it. When I pointed out our limited finances, he called me a spoil-sport. “It’ll inspire our writing,” he argued. I was not convinced. With a sigh he relented.

The issue of money would come up often.

We were renting a furnished two-bedroom apartment. The bedrooms were upstairs. Downstairs, the cow skull lorded over the living room. What was up with that anyway? When I asked about it, Lucius gave some vague answer I don’t entirely recall. He might have said it was a long-ago gift from his mother. But considering the dark nature of his upbringing, this hardly shed light on its significance. Sometimes he would hold it and gaze into its empty sockets, perhaps seeking inspiration, or perhaps just in homage to Hamlet reflecting on the skull of Yorick. He had read, and comprehended, all of Shakespeare by the age of 10, under threat of violence from his scholar father. Not just Shakespeare, but many other classics. Even more astonishing, he had to memorize much of it. No wonder he could write with such eloquence about so many things.

Soon after we moved in, Kate and Damon gave us a call. A package had arrived in their care. It was for Lucius. I drove over and picked it up and returned to a very spirited Lucius. He opened the package quickly. It contained miscellaneous items, most of it of a musical nature. The contents really didn’t make much sense. “Come on, come on,” Lucius said with growing agitation. “It’s gotta be in here. Where is it?” Picking up two maracas, he shook them. One sounded muffled. “Hah!” He shattered it to find several plastic bags.

I couldn’t believe it. It was wrong in so many ways. “You had drugs delivered to Kate and Damon’s place?” I kept picturing the police swooping down on them, putting them in handcuffs. Lucius calmly looked me in the eye and said, “Yeah.” Then he broke out in a little ditty.

Don’t get me wrong. Lucius had tremendous respect for Kate and Damon. He put a high value on their friendship and opinions. If, in his eyes, there had been significant risk in that delivery, he wouldn’t have done it. But oh, how Lucius savored my offended sensibilities. He liked jarring people out of their comfort zones. As mentioned before, he despised the pervasive holier-than-thou attitude Americans had towards the rest of the world. I think he despised the whole American way of life. He had a wicked habit of telling people what others had said about them. When I published my first story years later, Lucius had to let me know that a certain Clarionite had not liked it at all. He was a provocateur, ever bent on stirring things up. He wanted to stress relationships and force people to question their long-held convictions. But I sensed another side to it as well: envy. When someone else had a success, he liked to take them down a peg. He could be highly competitive.

Kate and Damon held regular workshops. A smattering of science fiction writers would show up, some coming from hundreds of miles away. We would form a circle in the large living room edged by many tall bookcases. If you were to randomly pull a book from a shelf and thumb through it, you’d likely find proofreading marks. Damon was in the habit of copyediting as he read, even when reading for pleasure.

In these workshops, my stories took a beating for their characters. In hindsight, that’s not surprising. My biggest problem was a lack of life experiences. I hadn’t dealt with enough people in various circumstances to know how to build interesting characters and give them credible conflicts. While my sense-of-wonder ideas and strong plotting received praise, without compelling characters it went for naught. Lucius, by contrast, had an abundance of life experiences, which he drew upon to create compelling characters. Granted, these characters were too often misfits, miscreants and other dregs of society; but they were always deftly drawn. Where Lucius truly stood out was in creating atmosphere and setting. No one could come close to him in that regard. But Lucius had one big weakness. He couldn’t plot.

“It’s a drug-trip story,” Damon said dismissively of a Lucius story (“Black Coral”), pointing out how the long climax devolved into lots of pointless imagery. Lucius said the point-of-view character wasn’t really on drugs. “It doesn’t matter whether the protagonist is on drugs,” said Damon. “It’s of a type I call the drug-trip story. The whole climax is just a bunch of meaningless imagery.” Damon listened patiently as Lucius made an impassioned defense, then repeated, “It’s a drug-trip story.”

Plot did not come easy for Lucius. Directionless through most of his life, he seemed to struggle with the very concept of procedure, of building something in a stepwise fashion from many pieces. He could never have been a software programmer. This does not mean his stories were simplistic. They were highly sophisticated in setting and atmosphere. In a single paragraph he might lay out the history of a village, its social-political climate, the ethnic mix of its inhabitants, their interactions, hopes and fears, how they made a living, while also introducing the main characters -- more information than in several of my stories. But there wasn’t much movement to the proceedings. It was like a high-resolution photograph, wonderfully composed and detailed, but unable to move or change. While some might argue that, as a skilled prose stylist, he needn’t bother with the armature of plot, in the minds of many it would have served him well (at a science fiction convention many years later, when Lucius introduced me to Connie Willis, she told me she was determined to teach Lucius to plot).

Sometimes I felt that if Lucius and I could somehow be merged, we’d make for a fully-formed writer destined for greatness. At other times, I imagined the result would be a deranged psychopath.

On one occasion I tried writing a story along the lines of Lucius -- light on plot, with the emphasis on setting and atmosphere. Kate and Damon were all over me. Don’t be trying to copy Lucius, they said. You have your own unique voice. Stay true to that. They seemed fearful I was being too strongly influenced by Lucius. But it was just an experiment, one of many I’ve tried; and I don’t know how one can possibly grow without attempting things outside oneself.

Life with Lucius was a messy affair. He never put anything away. Now and then I’d make the rounds, discovering spoiled foods not put back in the fridge. Mugs and glasses were everywhere, with countless cigarette butts swimming in residues of coffee and hard liquor. He had a peculiar way of reading the newspaper, tossing aside each sheet as he finished it, always in a different direction, so that in three days time one could no longer see any part of the floor. The same had been true at Clarion, where he was constantly losing things in his room, including the student manuscripts he was supposed to read and comment on, so he’d borrow my already-marked-up copies and lose them as well, leaving me without my notes for class. There was one notable exception to his misplacement of things: his guitar. He had a psychic connection to it. “Don’t step there!” he’d shout. And there it would be, under the debris.

Lucius had done a lot of drugs in his time. As a teenager, he’d gulp anything handed to him. In college, a professor was in the habit of giving him drugs, then consigning him to a room to write, curious to see what effect each had on his prose. Lucius told me of LSD’s effect: “I wrote in a circle, starting at the outer edge, working my way inward, getting ever smaller, until I reached the center.”

In Eugene, Lucius didn’t use drugs recreationally but rather as a tool. His canon was, “If you don’t work on it, you’re wasting it.” His drug of choice was marijuana. He’d smoke a joint or two, then write. I tried it a time or two, but ended up with gibberish. “It takes practice,” he told me. “You need to learn to work on it.” But I never really pursued it.

One morning, while reviewing what he’d written the night before, Lucius threw his notebook across the living room with a “Fuck!” Retrieving it, I looked at page after page of lines with the barest squiggle. “Too much weed,” he said. “Can’t read my own handwriting. Oh, well. I’ll just write it again -- and better.” I was never quite convinced that marijuana served him as a writing tool. It seemed more a rationalization for continuing its use. But there was no doubt that he could write -- and write well -- on it, as I had ample opportunities to read his remarkable prose after such sessions.

One evening Lucius went out for a walk and returned well after midnight. Drunk, in high spirits, not at all sleepy, he told me of his adventure. He’d gone to a restaurant to eat. While there, he noticed a young woman standing up near the cashier. He assumed she was a waitress, only she never did anything. After the real waitress had taken his order and then brought him his food, the woman walked over close to his table. “You interested in some action?” Staring down at his plate, a bit taken aback, Lucius mumbled, “I just want to eat my hamburger.” The woman retreated. So he ate his hamburger. When done, he went up and paid for the meal at the cashier. While putting change back in his wallet, he took a step aside and said to the woman, “How much?” Lucius laughed about it, the assembly-line nature of paying for food, then for sex.

Outside, Lucius negotiated the asking price of $15. “How ‘bout instead I just get us a room and buy us a case of beer?” The woman accepted. So they’d made a party of it lasting several hours. “She was nice,” he said. “It was a nice experience. She liked me.” And he was probably telling the truth. He hit it off implausibly well with so many women. Once, when I paid Kate and Damon a visit by myself, Damon interrogated me. “What is it about Lucius that women find so irresistible?” Kate stood nearby, grinning at Damon, amused by his curiosity. It was a very good question, because Lucius wasn’t much to look at. He had the grizzled, weatherbeaten face of a pirate, and he’d pretty much destroyed his nose with coke. As for his body, it was a sack of potatoes. I did my best to answer. Lucius had traveled extensively and was full of anecdotes, which he told extremely well, especially with his deep voice. There was an intimacy to the way he conversed, like you were the most important person in the world. He could be wildly funny and was always impulsive, alive in the moment. Life around Lucius was full of surprises. And women really liked that.

Lucius’ little adventure disturbed me, but not on any moral grounds. It was a financial concern. What I haven’t mentioned up to now is that Lucius had borrowed a considerable sum from me (later I was to learn he’d borrowed from a good many friends and relatives). So I had a vested interest in his spending. He could be so impulsive. On our cross-country trip, he’d buy turquoise at roadside stands in the desert. During our Vegas debacle, as we walked through a casino surrounded by flashing neon and clanging bells, he said he felt the luck and needed to do some serious gambling (thankfully our host talked him out of it). Up in Eugene, he would pay for psychic readings, and he’d go to bars and restaurants; and while I can’t fault him for wanting to know the future or needing to socialize and have a night life, that was money we could ill afford to spend.

Then there was the betting. Lucius was known to bet on sporting events. He was a big boxing fan. We both were. The first fight between Sugar Ray Leonard and Roberto Duran took place in June of 1980, shortly before Clarion. If I recall correctly, Lucius bet on Duran in that fight and made some money. The rematch took place on November 25, 1980, early into our Eugene sojourn. Lucius truly despised Leonard, viewed him as an American fabrication, a polished product of capitalism. He was surrounded by fat cats who had groomed him to appeal to a wide audience, and Lucius hated him with a passion. Duran, on the other hand, had grown up in poverty, swam in shark-infested waters as a boy to make a living. He stood for the underprivileged, the impoverished, the disenfranchised, the Third World. Duran was Lucius’ kind of guy. Though Lucius never said anything, I strongly suspect he bet big on that fight, which ended in the 8th with Duran’s infamous, “No mas.”

Lording over all the above craziness was Lucius’ continuing obsession with Lady X. He remained tormented, on a roller coaster of emotions. He kept coming up with outrageous schemes for destabilizing Lady X’s marriage or otherwise provoking her into leaving her husband. I was a good listener, seldom judgmental, and for better or worse I became his sounding board. One scheme involved writing lots of letters to Lady X but not sending them from Eugene. Instead, he would give the letters to cohorts in other locations around the country or even the world, and they would then mail the letters to Lady X. This was sure to drive her crazy. She’d be puzzling all the time about where he was and wouldn’t be able to put him out of mind. For another scenario (worked out in great detail), he would hire a high-class prostitute to take one of the husband’s college classes and slowly seduce him into an affair, and afterwards make a big scene with the husband and Lady X, presenting photos as proof. Crazy crazy stuff.

Lucius didn’t just write to Lady X; he also phoned her regularly. These calls were long in distance and duration. One day I received a nasty call from the phone company demanding an immediate installment payment, as they’d detected a suspicious spike. I was shocked at the size of our bill. Lucius agreed to pay it.

All too soon we had our own “No mas” moment. Just a couple of months into Eugene, Lucius told me he couldn’t live this far away from Lady X, he needed to move back closer to her, the better to keep pressure on her. He left behind most of his belongings, including his guitar and that big cow skull. A few weeks later he wanted me to ship him his guitar. That was easier said than done. Time and again UPS rejected the package. Desperate for his guitar, Lucius told me to do whatever to get it to him. UPS finally accepted it after I lied about the contents and declined insurance.

As for the cow skull, it stayed with me for many years, perhaps decades, slowly losing teeth as I moved from place to place, until finally, sadly, I tossed it.

Kate and Damon were sympathetic to my plight. They thought it was harsh. There I was, having quit a promising job to move across country with Lucius, only to be abandoned after just two months. Now I was stuck paying full rent and other expenses. I managed to last another few months, but with funds running low I needed to find work. Oregon was not good hunting grounds for a software programmer, so I made trips down to Silicon Valley for job interviews. Eventually I landed a job, and that was the end of Shangrila.

[Drunk Monk]

a tooth, a bit of horn, something. sounds like it might have been a powerful muse when looked at right, and there's such a dearth of muses nowadays.

speaking of muses, dm can surely identify with the kaya/writing issue having grappled with it many times. there is a discipline to it and dm agrees with l's “If you don’t work on it, you’re wasting it.” in fact, dm may just have to poach that phrase (but ain't doom poaching what this forum is all about? we are all in such different circles now that doom serves well as an oblique muse). lord knows how many notebooks dm has full of illegible scribbles. it can be the razor's edge, but so can any method to find the muse. she is an elusive bitch, that's for sure.

[cranefly]

But there were a number of difficult moves over the years, some with considerable downsizing, and at some point I had a mental lapse and convinced myself to let it go.
Might there be a tooth in a box out in the garage somewhere? Possibly. But I'm kinda doubting it.