Cool Zone Media.
Book Club Club book Club book Club, and welcome to cool Zone Media book Club, which is your weekly fiction podcast of book club that comes from Cool Zone Media. I'm your host, Marta Kiljoy, and my guest today is gar Hi Gare.
Hello.
How's your Let's pretend like it's Sunday, because that's when people are listening.
How's your Sunday going?
Pretty good? Isn't it Easter coming up soon? You would think I would be the person in this conversation who would know.
Yeah, really, really really betray your Catholic upbringing, Margaret.
Yeah, it is two weeks from now ish and one week from when this podcast comes out.
Okay, so we still you still have time to get your Easter feast together.
That's good.
Yeah, in order to do my weird pagan celebration that we've decided to call Christianity exciting.
Yeah.
Hello, dear listener, Margaret was wrong. It is Easter. I sure, hope you have your little chocolate eggies ready for the celebration. Eat well, eat well.
Actually that's a good segue into today's thing, today's story, because today's.
Well, I'm not gonna tell you what it's about. It's a story you'll hear what it's about.
But wait, wait, wait are stories about things? Some of them?
I just thought there were things that happen. Yes, Actually, all fiction is true. That's what the word fiction means.
Everything possible to be believed is the image is an image of the truth, said William Blake.
So true, bestie.
Yeah.
So today's story is called The Last Beat of My Heart and it is by Edward Morris.
It is Edward Morris. Well.
Edward Morris is a proud pagan who studies Buddhism and is a queer, disabled retired bouncer from Portland. He's a twenty eleven nominee for the Pushcart Prize in Literature. He was nominated for the two thousand and nine Reesling in the two thousand and five BSFA. His short stories have been published over one hundred and fifty times and have made it into Italian, Polish, Finnish, Spanish, Hungarian and even Canadian. Oh wow, which is the language that you grew up speaking?
Yeah? That was my native tongue. Yeah.
He has a novel called Alphabet of Lightning that is out from Broken Eyebooks. The Last Beat of my Heart by Edward Morris zero zero zero one zero zero zero two power. The plug is seated in the wall by spinly little hands. The juice flows. The tiny piercing green light comes on. Two young girl's voices, rapped and fascinated by an old new toy. Do you remember when they used to use these for real? Before even CDs? As if I'm only two years older than you, It's eighties music.
Look on the.
Label all different, okay, So how do you make it play? Ahem, let me see sis side a stop auto reverse, crunch, crunch, crunch, blank tape hiss. Then, just like Heaven The Cure Electra Records, nineteen eighty seven, I have to put this song first on the tape. Laurie will know why it was playing the last time we hung out. It was playing when she kissed me. That's why it goes first. There are rules and steps to everything, everything a kiss, leaving your body,
taking a punch, making a mixtape. Laurie's older brother, George, is a DJ, and he says you can't put more than one song by the same band on the same side of the tape. It just doesn't work. I understand that, just like I understand that I'm stuck here stuck being a kid, stuck doing this thing that takes forever. There are parts about this tape and this night that I don't want to remember, but I can't shut this off, Like it's all a bad dream and I'm just about to wake up, except that I never do.
I never do.
It's this hot night, August twenty first, and seventh grade is about to start in a week, and things are happening. I'm pissed off at Dad. I'm going to sneak out and go to what's left of the dance anyway, after i make this mixtape, I already feel like I'm starting to leave my body again. I think that when you get out of your body, you have to learn to either stay out and move around or come back and make yourself move. There are rules and steps to it.
I want to know them. See, I just learned how to leave my body for longer than a minute or a second or whatever. I'm going to try it again soon. I remember all the words, are enough of the ones that I took away from Uncle Walter's house on the last day. I remember how I do I do. I remember how to take a punch too. I've had the practice you have to learn how to hit, back, block, fall, or hide. Even when a body thinks it can't, the
mind finds a way. It's like that anytime something awful happens very fast, I have a lot of time to think until until until, oh God, I'm done copying the last song on this tape, and Dad's passed out, and I can sneak out to the dance. Chris Clark from down the street is bringing this giant bottle of homemade wine he ganged from his dad. And the last time I went to a dance, the coolest girl I know kissed me. This time, I'm bringing the tape just in
case Laurie's there. Anything can happen when I'm done, When the tape is done, when I'm Saturday Night a Holocaust. Dead Kennedy's Alternative Tentacles nineteen eighty two, which is a thing that you can buy because it's an album, much like the things that you can buy that we advertise, which also bear the complexity of being anti capitalists like the Dead Kennedys and yet making their living.
Through the sale of products.
Here's ads, and we're bec done. It's still now, It's still then. I'm still right here wanting something I can never have, dreaming the real world again where it is some year I don't even want to hear. I don't want to hear it. Don't want, don't, don't. Decay has its rules and steps too. I don't get played much anymore. I haven't. I can't. I can't remember Laurie's face. I can, I can. I have no idea if I remember it right.
But I remember Laurie's mouth, like raindrops and strawberries, the way she put her hands in my hair and looked into my eyes just like her, like nobody and nothing else but her, which was the only way I ever wanted her to look in my eyes. I remember her face. I think I have to.
Believe that it is Laurie's face.
I have no idea where I'll go when I finally go, when the ribbon on this tape breaks, or its iron oxide emulsion eventually cycles down to nothing. I was almost done learning how to leave my body in dreams and sometimes awake when the awful thing happened, the one I
don't want to remember. I was almost done learning to say those words that Uncle Walter was saying that one day when I walked in on him in the back room of his garage where the kids weren't supposed to go when we were over to visit, back when I was only eleven and there were still visits. I heard Uncle Walter saying those words when I saw him walk up out of his body. He was chanting them in his throat like he could sing in three different tones.
But Uncle Walter wasn't singing really, He was sort of shaping the notes where his body was because his essence was. At the time, I lost my balance and stumbled where I was standing and trying to be quiet, cracking the back of my head on the doorframe. Uncle Walter's essence was walking up out of his body where he sat in that broken backed, farty, old lazy boy of his in some kind of strange posture. Then his essence stopped walking up out of him. What happened wasn't pretty. Uncle
Walter ended the process. He was startled I had startled him. We exchanged some words of our own then Uncle Walter and me, not very nice ones. He cut me out of his life until he wrote that letter. We were both horrified. We should have calmed down. Later on, by myself, I parroted those initial words I heard Uncle Walter say to make himself walk up out of his body. I said them as well as I could in the dark in my own room. Later, I could feel the words
in the back of my throat. It felt like swallowing a bee. I needed to sit down so I could stand up out of myself and climb the spiderweb ladder. The silver cord thing that came up out of my head and pulled me to my feet, making me look toward the ceiling and sing more of what weren't quite words. I could sense that there was a world on the other end of that silver cord, maybe even one with lions and wardrobes and scary sorceress queens, giants and singing
harps and magic beans, anything I could imagine. Maybe I tried and tried to get up out of here. Maybe I never wanted to come back, but couldn't figure out how to cut.
Off and float away. Not in time, Not in time.
I could do it in school if I really thought about it for a whole minutes, pretend like I was sleeping, and then go out through the top of my head along the ceiling towards the clean, bright light that whispered, come, but I couldn't yet I was still alive. It wasn't time Rabbit over you the damned Big Beat Records, nineteen
eighty three. I've been having better luck leaving my body right before I lay down to sleep while saying those weird words I somehow knew in my bones to be Scott's Gaelic, the ones I heard when I walked in on what I shouldn't have seen. Then there were the nasty words we had, and the first ones that good old Walter ever said on the subject shortly before that, when he came back into himself.
Yeah, I'll teach you to do that.
When your balls drop, Uncle Walter told me when I walked in on him when he got done being startled. But his dark eyes were still doing that weird thing they did sometimes. The lights were starting to flicker in that room, the way that lights always did around Uncle Walter when he got upset. They did when he walked back into his body, just before he spoke. First, I never asked the question that immediately preceded his actual comment.
Uncle Walter pulled the question straight from my head. I felt him do it, and that made me remember something even earlier, the way the candles flickered in the garage. When I was six and I walked in on Uncle Walter and Dad shouting at each other. There was some kind of a circle drawn on the concrete, half finished. It didn't look like paint. They looked like they were going to fight. I remember the nasty words that they
had that day, too. I remember all the nasty words everyone Dad, or Uncle Walter or anyone else ever said. I have to strange, remember Laurie's face, but I remember all those nasty words. Dad never talked to Uncle Walter again after I was eleven, but I could pick who to listen to, one or neither. I can't be in
touch too much. Uncle Walter wrote in that one weird letter not long later, it would break a lot of words, whatever the hell that meant, and cause a lot of problems between me and your dad that I would never ever be able to solve. Not like there aren't enough of those anyway. I'm sorry, have a good life, Walter. I brought this on myself now I have forever to be sorry. But we don't talk about things like that in this house, not until this tape is done. Then
maybe we will because I'm done. I was almost done. It's almost done. I'm almost done rubber ring the Smiths Sire nineteen eighty seven. And you know what else is problematic, like the Smiths.
The advertisements that you may or may not hear on this podcast.
We've been having some bad ones lately, and we've been working to get them out of here. But in general, if you think to yourself, do Margaret and Garrison support you becoming a jailer? Think I can speak for both of us when I say the answer is yes, yeah, you could probably refer to our body of work.
And come to that conclusion yourself.
Yeah, exactly.
And you know, so here the other ads that are hopefully not for the state of Israel or becoming a jailer.
Hopefully those have been excised by.
Now and we're back.
I am an endlessly repeating placeholder on the skin of this emulsion that decays down to nothing even now. Lodged in the hot, dusty left hand cassette deck of a little Sears component stereo I bought with lawnmowing money in eighty nine.
That was it last year.
It has a CD deck in the top, but I don't have any CDs just a whole bunch of these mixtapes I started making for my big sister Hannah's old records before Dad burned half of them for having skulls and stuff on them and band names like Suicidal Tendencies or the Butthole Surfers nineteen eighty nine. Last year, when everything but Dad made sense, I can tell where the
skip is, the little leader between each song. Just once I got stuck, stuck, stuck, and now the smiths are telling me not to forget the songs that saved my life. I was wearing George's big DJ headphones when I snaked the extra long cord fifty feet through the room and out onto the roof to go smoke a cigarette. That time, I didn't care whether Dad smelled it. You could damn well come up and yank me down. Mom was on the back porch twenty feet below me. I was more
worried about her. She always went back there and did a lot of wash or dishes or something to get away, to get her head away. I remember Walter yelling at Dad in his garage when I was six, don't you hurt my sister, you lousy drunk. But back then I couldn't put two and two together and get anything. I was six six six. All of a sudden, the back door banged, and Mom was screaming up at me, Get downstairs, get downstairs.
And I saw.
Hallelujah Leonard Cohen, Columbia, nineteen eighty four. I saw the column of fire lick up the side of the back porch, the flamethrower belch from the dryer vent. I had time to be fascinated, just time. I opened my mouth to scream, and I didn't even think about what I was screaming. And I was screaming the words, those words, those sketchy Uncle Walter words at the top of my lungs. I saw Mom jump back a bit and make the sign of the cross. And then those headphones had a long cord.
I mentioned that not silver, but curly plastic coated copper wire. It led back in the window to the tape deck. When the awful thing happened, I remember the song, the one I was copying, The last Beat of My Heart. Susie and the Banshees, Polydor Records, nineteen eighty eight.
Ah God.
Susie's operatic voice starts out slow and goes up up up as my skin goes up, up, up, and my heart just keeps going faster, faster, faster, And to the last beat is immolation. The last beat is twenty nineteen, eighteen seventeen. Click Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch, auto reverse play. Sometimes I dream like now or the other dream I had where powers Berg FD put my tape deck in a bin with a bunch of stuff to take to the Goodwill. I may be there still, but dreams decay.
Part of me knows that, just like part of me knows it was a bad idea to go out that way, whether I was right or not. When I was only halfway through making this mixtape for LORI no reason payback for that kiss. It was just after dinner. The old man popped me in the mouth for spiking at my mohawk. Then he called my music satanic. I said what I said, and then Mom goes, don't use Dad's logic against him, honey, it bruises his ego. And then he hit or a lick too. And then that was an hour or so ago.
It's almost seven. I'm away to the roof of smoke. Just as soon as I finish, I'll leave another tape in maybe the Misfits or gg Allen, just to give Dad nightmares when this song is done. Those tapes are in the file cabinet where I keep my smokes, where Dad doesn't know. The drawer goes all the way back. And there are other things, the ones I started making the words of my own that you won't find on any backwards records because the witches in our family never worshiped Satan.
Dad then crack.
I remember his fist connecting with my mouth, flattening my lips to my teeth, knocking me sideways and down. I remember, I remember the blood of a newly wakened witch spilling an anger on that floor, and the curse I shrieked at my father, the curse that comes back to me one thousandfold as I stop the world and melt, and the first song comes on again, and I wake into the hot August dream a little while longer, restless and wanting to be out the door, waiting to finish this
mixtape and bring it down to the school dance. That night, Dad accused me of talking to Uncle Walter behind his back. I wish Uncle Walter and I would have talked a good bit more that's the end of the story.
I have a one main question.
Okay, what's a tape deck?
Uh?
When I was a kid, there was a cartoon called Dark Wing Duck and one of the jokes, the only joke I remember from this pretty mid car tune. YEA was the younger kid being like records are those like big CDs? And I remember thinking, I'm in like fourth or fifth grade. I remember thinking it's a pretty bad joke.
Wow, wow, Margaret, I'm sorry, my sense of humor is worse than your fourth grade sense of humor. That's right, I'm attempting to say. I just I think it's really fast. I love the like the like what's a fax machine jokes? You know?
Yeah?
Yeah, yeah, I actually really like them.
I briefly had a tape deck, but I transitioned to CDs pretty soon. Yeah, but I do remember some old, some old it's probably some kind of like weird like Christian music tapes that I had.
Yeah.
My first tape was Smashing Pumpkins Siamese Dream that my sister dubbed for me, with a bunch of ram on the other side and some new water.
Okay, well it's like two out of three.
Yeah, no.
Yeah, that's I'm not a big Smashing Pumpkins fan anymore. But new order thumbs.
Oh yeah yeah.
And the what was the first like CD you bought?
Oh, this is probably gonna be embarrassing. It might have been in an Owl City CD, which is which is quite embarrassing.
Okay.
So the reason that like old people like to think that young people don't know anything about the past is that old people don't know anything about the present or the recent past.
I have no idea who al City is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you actually did know what a tape deck was. Yeah, And and I knew all but one of one of the bands in the story, which I'm which I'm actually pleasantly surprised by.
Hell yeah, no, owl.
City was like a like.
A Christian electronic like sound producer. Oh okay, the guy actually created most of the sounds for like the fifth generation of the iPhone. So he both made music, which some of which is like okay, but like like Christian Moby, I don't I don't know what Moby is. Maybe, oh, interested add that to my list?
Okay, uh self?
Right? Just Vegan who is almost almost radical, who made a lot of electronic music in the nineties. It kind of sounds like the postal Service, but slightly more electronic and slightly worse. That's kind of that's kind of owl City in my mind.
Okay, I like the postal Service. I also like the post I don't know if I like the worst version, but see that's the thing, right, Yeah, I found that very fun. It is It is definitely always startling once you get sent back into your body by another like corporeal form entering the room that you're traveling from.
Yeah, that always that always does take a sec to adjust. Like I can totally handle like some like grotesque like earth spirit showing up, but if another like actual human being walks in, that's like incredibly jarring.
Yeah.
I like this story because it's it's a magic set in the real world story that feels like real, like it feels like yeah, yeah, absolutely casting fireballs or whatever. He's no, this is this is what like actual like
occult practice looks like. Yeah, and then just talking about how like you know, there's the whole genre is not the right word, but maybe trope of like people with shitty parents, especially dads, who need to find ways to escape, and they escape into their music, right and I like the idea of taking that literally and seeing what it looks like. I love that the silver chord, you know, the headphones with their cord is the same as like the silver chord that allows you to move in the astral plane.
I just I loved that.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I also am a sucker for this like generational thing that has come down through time but is like not wanted the modern context, you know, the like the weird Scott's Gaelic magic or whatever that they're referring to.
Yeah, and it definitely has like like a like an American Gothic kind of feel like doing magic and like an old like basement garage as opposed to like doing it in like a temple or like cathedral, and like the like the like the general like.
Western esoteric tradition. Yeah, where you have like robes and.
You're doing like ceremonial stuff versus like you're drawing chalk circles and like the basement.
Yeah, and laying on a lazy boy in order to be comfy while you leave your body.
Yeah, there's like there's like a dryer and like washing machine in the background 'or like that's Yeah, I kind of enjoy that style of like Gothic American combined with this like very like low fi occult current, which is honestly pretty well reflected in the uh in the mixtape uh.
He and all of the artists mentioned.
Yeah, it's also funny. I usually don't like stories where I'm not entirely sure what's happening, Like.
I actually who interesting. I love stories that I don't know what's happening.
Okay, and for me, like I feel like often I think sometimes it's just and is not the case. I really like the way that I don't totally know what happened in this story. I've read it several times, right sure, And I am not entirely certain whether this is the voice that is coming from the mixtape. Like I'm not certain whether the framing story of the two girls who find an old tape, whether they're like hearing this as
an audio narration between songs. I also don't know whether like the idea is that the protagonist has died and then like is now sort of living in this tape inasmuch as they're living anywhere, Like I don't quite know, and I actually like that I don't know, and I usually.
Don't I definitely love stuff where it has that level of like it has the level of ambiguity that I experienced my actual life.
Yeah, I like when that happens, when.
I'm like, I'm not sure what the voices in my head that I'm talking to, Like, where do they come from?
Is that? Is that just me?
I really appreciate that sort of thing, And like, yeah, the the notion that you can like continue to live in some way through a recording that gets played back, Yeah, I definitely find to be a very fun concept and very like evocative of like the whole point of making art as well. It's like, is our just this really like almost sad attempt at immortality?
Yeah, but no, I definitely enjoy.
When I have I don't have like a firm ground underneath me, because I feel like the ground we experience, I think people assume is slightly more firm than what it actually may be.
I think that that was like a big part of the growing up process for me was learning that the the ground under our feet is not as firm as as we thought, and like realizing like once you're like, oh, there isn't really a neurotypical you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, like and the more you realize that, you're like, oh, everyone is just different levels of like higher low functioning crazy, Like it's useful.
And all the stuff they're talking about in the story of like with with their mention of like dreams and waking up from dreams and the slow intermeshing of dream and wakefulness.
And I think a lot of these concepts for young.
People specifically, are easier to envision via dreams, Like it's hard to figure out where like the bottom of a dream is, like how like how far can you keep going? Sometimes you think, oh, this is all right, this is just I'm awake, I'm doing going through my tasks, and then boom, you're totally somewhere else.
You're like, oh, that was actually a dream.
Yeah, and you just see like this like almost like eternal descent and how there's certain ideas of that that are absolutely reflected in our kind of everyday waking existence as well.
Yeah, yeah, no, I.
Love all this stuff and it actually ties into I'm gonna read the notes from the author from Edward Morris that he sent me. He said about the story one, it ends with the stories for Jackie Kessler and the ties that bind, and then the notes about the stories I could rant for a week. It's of course mostly drawn from life, but it's also an homage to the great writer who's work crossed my axis at the same time,
Jackie Kessler and her horrifying the ties that bind. There's a two thousand and six story her narrator didn't get stuck on a mixtape. She got her face eaten off by Jack Russell. It was more of a mean girl's scenario, but it hit me so hard I had to try my own. I have enough other things to rant about the subject matter for a full blown interview, trying to keep this concise. That was a basically he was like, there's so much to it that I kind of can't get into it.
Yeah, No, I think that I think.
Underlines some of what we were talking about a little bit with yeah, like the uh, how you can like capture the human form within like linear experiences of art yea, even though I would say it's it's hard to usually view the human form in that fashion because it is both a linear experience but now it also exists independent of linear time, Like it is this this thing from before, but now it could be played in the future and it's still there in the future, it's still repeating that same moment.
Yeah, I don't know.
I think the day that this comes out, I'll be investigating ghosts at the Oregon Ghost Conference. And there's certainly some people that view ghosts in a similar way. They view ghosts as like a moment of a person caught in time that keeps replaying the same action over and over again. They're not really like even like interactable, but it's just it's just replaying this thing that like imprinted onto.
Like I don't quite know how tape decks work, but I assume if you have like two tapes in a little bit of the first one can get pushed into the second one if it like is done in directly. Possibly I'm totally like constructing a terrible metaphor, but as if like a person going through a specific motion was so strong or impactful to them that it gets imprinted on the next person who's going to.
Enter into this space as well.
Right, And there's certainly people that view ghosts in that framework, which I find to be a really interesting way to think about that concept.
I like that I have ever told you my theory on ghosts. I don't think so My theory on ghosts is that I don't believe in ghosts, but it's a conscious choice because of the.
Way that I live, Like, I mean, that's more or less my view on ghosts generally.
Yeah, yeah, because I'm like, at some point I was like, I you know, I was like, I live in a van by myself, sleeping in the middle of the woods. And then later I was like, now I'm in a cabin in the middle of the woods, and now I'm in a house in the middle of woods.
It just doesn't do me any good believe that, like, you know, totally something to be around that has mean, that's that's kind of some more of my like chasmetic background.
But yes, absolutely, yeah, because I mean, and that doesn't make me right or wrong.
It just makes it like it's the way that I.
Need to cope.
Believing a ghost would just more or less be like an inconvenience. They start of how the human mind works. Yeah, sometimes it's easier just be like, nah, I'm just I'm just not going to deal with that right now. Yeah, Like I've I've totally thought about which beliefs I currently hold that would that I would change if I were to move into like an isolated forested area. Yeah, of course I would change certain beliefs about how reality works.
Yeah, exactly.
There used to be, like, you know, I used to live in this this off grid barn and guests would stay in the other room in the barn, and they would like report ghost sightings in this barn. And so it came up at a meeting people were like, oh, we should talk about the ghost in the barn. And I was the only one who lived in the barn full time. So I was like, there is no ghost in the barn on the agenda. And they were like, why are being so dismissed, And I was like, because I live here alone.
Like I mean, that is kind of why I appreciate the role of like the city magician. Because you're surrounded by people, you have a little bit more flexibility to allow certain things into your like orbit of being and
like your orbit of experience. But I absolutely like respect the kind of witches and mystics that like take the hermit path and and like go out and I can totally see myself doing that at some point, Like I totally respect the log Lady journey, yeah, because yeah, I think that is an incredibly valuable method of kind of experienced reality, and I think it can it can have you also be much closer to certain other types of experiences than in the hustle and bustle and constant like
consciousness and light that is just perforating human cities.
Yeah, I think they do.
Both have really specific advantages for like ways of finding wisdom, you know, I think that. Yeah, But before we get totally off track, we should probably and end this particular episode, and to end it with plugs from Edward Morris. Edward Morris says broken Eyebooks dot Com is a wonderful small press that needs everyone's help. They run Gwendolen Kisseday, they run Matthew Bartlett, and they gave my highly experimental alphabet
of Lightning a hope. Alphabet of Lightning is the beginning of a novel series called There Was a Crooked Man, which is about as long as Dies the Fire or maybe Song of Ice and Fire, which are two of my favorite book series. So that was promising. I haven't read this yet. This story was the first thing I read by Edward Morris, but I really liked it, so
I'm going to look out more. Yeah, it is a challenged, difficult, challenging and tremendously important work that took me three decades to nail, and all my friends who have read it deliriously love it. So everyone should check out Alphabet of Lightning. And if they want to check out you and your work and they're not currently listening to that, it could happen here feed, but instead listening to my feed, where can they find you?
Well, you can find me only it could have it here feed. I recently put together an update on the situation in Atlanta, Georgia ree Copcity. I tried to summarize the past six months of events in like forty five minutes, so that was a very very interesting task. And then also I'm I'm You can probably check out my my feed on Twitter dot com at Hungry Bowtie for some timely coverage of the Oregon Ghost Conference, which will eventually turn into some sort of episode, but not not until
I have time to process the experience. The everyone should check out the Atlanta update. It's a it's a very good episode.
And as for me, if you're not listening to this on the Cool People Did Cool Stuff Feed, I have a podcast It's called Cool People Did Cool Stuff it is about cool people who did cool stuff. And also my most recent substack post is called Afraid of the Woman in the Mirror and it is about transness and monstrosity.
And about becoming Blenny Mary.
And we'll see you all next week.
It Could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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Thanks for listening.