I, Zorn: Part Three (Why a 400 Pound Elvis Kicked the Crap out of a Bionic Mother Teresa)

Think of all the dead celebrities you know. Think of them as you crouch naked in a filthy trailer, giggling in idiot monotone as a noose tightens around your neck, as images of desert war-porn flash on a giant TV screen installed by your hypertrophic dyke dominatrix. Count the number of dead celebrities you know as you gout tainted jizz and shudder in the throes of auto erotic asphyxiation.

Let's say you count twenty dead celebrities aloud, in a barely audible croak as your nipple clamps tighten and electrodes spark and crackle on the charred mound of your peckerhead. You figure those twenty dead celebrities really ARE dead but they're not. Only about half of them are wormfood, their catafalqued corpses moldering in adipocere. The rest are stuck in nine giant motherships orbiting our planet in quantum-dimensional spaces that render them invisible.

About half the dead celebrities you ever heard of are alive, if not well, in alien spaceships hovering above in hostile scrutiny. How do I know? I know because I saw them there. I saw purportedly dead movie icons like John Wayne and James Dean and Bruce Lee and Marilyn Monroe. I saw putatively dead singers like Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, dancers like Fred Astaire and Sammy Davis and Ginger Rogers, painters like Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro and Francis Bacon, cannibal serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer and Winston Churchill and Mother Teresa. They're all up there in those spaceships singing and dancing and acting and kicking the living shit out of each other in vats of hot lava as their Reticulan overlords look on in paroxysms of noiseless mirth.

You ever watch that TV show X-Files? Sure you have. You watched it yesterday as you hung hog-tied from a metal spar in the sewage-clogged trailer of your acromegalic dyke dominatrix Helga. The X Files mythos has hostile aliens colluding with Uncle Sam in a vast conspiracy of domination, conquest and Nazi eugenics. I'm here to tell you the conspiracy is real. It exists and is fully active now as we speak across this fiberglass partition with our nuts nestled warm in a red ribbon giftsock and our outsize nipples pressed to the pane.

I know it's real because I was part of the conspiracy. Or rather, I was forced to become part of the conspiracy after my abduction that night in New Mexico. My memories of the event are clear as a kick in the nads on dry ice but everything afterwards is garbled, fragmented, hazy. I remember that brilliant circle of light in the desert, that white beam blazing down on those five Reticulans and on Elvis, James Dean and Bruce Lee. It's what I saw when I rose from a dead faint that night in the badlands.

No one spoke at first and no one moved. The silence was absolute, not even a keen of wind across the scape. Just for a second I thought I was hallucinating but I knew I wasn't. I don't feel my calves and buttocks when I hallucinate. There's no sensation in my calves and buttocks and my pecker feels gaseous or even vaguely astral, like it's made of refried ectoplasm. But there was none of that here. I had gooseflesh on my rump and I'd grown a REM sleep boner for some reason, pretty embarrassing, you don't want a blue buddha messing up your first alien abduction.

I spoke up first as usual. If I hadn't, we might've stood there forever in frozen tableau. I come in pieces, I said, if not in peace. I'd like to break bread with you guys or failing that, break wind over a narcotic peace pipe with windchimes and mantras sounding in ambient trance as turbaned capuchin monkeys serve iridescent absinthe in flutes of dark crystal. No one answered. My overture hadn't gone over too well.

I thought you guys were dead, I said, addressing the humans, but I'm glad you're not. I always dug you, Bruce Lee, and you, Jimmy Dean, and you, Elvis Presley, even though I knew you were a lousy bigot who stole his music from black people and became a fucking zillionaire while they toiled on unrecompensed and unrecognized.

They didn't answer but they did move. Elvis struck one of his dramatic stage poses, Bruce assumed his Jeet Kune Do fighter's stance and Jimmy grabbed his crotch, ran a hand through his hair and swaggered like he used to before supposedly dying in a storm of crushed metal that tore his head off and sent it sailing through the kitchen window of a nearby farmhouse straight into the cauldron of possum stew that Aunt Mae had set out for Sunday lunch. Jeet Kune Do is the martial art Bruce Lee invented after years of studying Wing Chun with Yip Man out in the urban thickets of Hong Kong.

What gives fellas, I asked, you guys planning to beam my ass up to heaven? They chuckled then, speaking in unison. You're going to wish you were in Hell when they get done with you. Hell can't be worse than what they have up there. I didn't like the sound of that but it didn't matter. I was rising butt first, floating up into that column of light. The Reticulans were ascending too, Elvis, Bruce and Jimmy in tow.

And that's where my sequential memory ends. Everything afterwards plays like an ill-recalled, gladly-relinquished dream. Not a dream. A nightmare. I learned, up in the bowels of the mother ship, that they'd been watching me a long while, tracking me from the time I left the rez on my peripatetic flogger's quest. They'd studied me, understood my shamanic power and innate genius. That's why they wanted me up there, for their program.

Over the next ten years I WAS part of their program. They systematically drained me during that time, sapped my powers with fibrous umbilical cords fastened to my chakra centers via fleshy disc mouths lined with teeth. What they sought was Agenbite, a luminous sap found in the pituitary glands of powerful medicine men. Apparently I had Agenbite stored up to my gills with more being produced every minute.

About once every week (by my calculation) I was taken off the cords and sexually revitalized by three foot female Reticulans with translucent nipples on their chins (one on each) and green lacquered lashes on their lower lids. Reticulans blink very rarely but when they do it's bottom up, not top down as with humans, and it makes a sound like a wet baseball hitting a bare gut. They're noisy blinkers, those Reticulans.

It wasn't much fun getting ravaged by three foot alien chicks but at least I wasn't forced to participate in the 'entertainments' imposed on the celebrities imprisoned in the mother ship. The celebrities had to sing and dance and even do some theater, but mainly the Reticulans amused themselves by pitting genetically altered icons against one another in vicious and bloody gladiatorial contests. I once saw Marilyn Monroe feeding on John Wayne's skull as she cornholed him in mutant replication of a female mantis.

I also saw a massively corpulent Elvis face off against a heavily muscled, anabolically enhanced Mother Teresa who put me in mind of a prune-faced power lifter in a blue and white sari. They'd fought before, those two, and Teresa had won each time but Elvis emerged victorious on this occasion. He distracted her with peeled bananas and gobs of peanut butter, then proceeded to kick the living crap out of her bionic Albanian butt with rubberized Dutch clogs as she sang Old Man River in a deep-baritone, testosterone-fuelled descant.

I never could figure out how Teresa'd ended up here in this Reticulan mother ship. I asked Jimmy Dean about it once. Isn't she, like, supposed to be in heaven tap-dancing for Pater Seraphicus and his posse of divinely jock-strapped popes? Sure, said Jimmy Dean, but there was some sort of nasty clerical error and she ended up in Hell by mistake. She was being repeatedly shredded by demon dogs in a cistern of boiling brimstone when the Reticulans rescued her, if you can call it a rescue. Jehovah should've replevied her steroid pumped ass by now but apparently he's having too much fun watching her get pounded by that tub of hog-lard Elvis.

Jimmy Dean's explanation saddened me and I wanted to weep as Teresa bawled out Old Man River in a weird melange of Bengali, Vulgate Latin and demotic Albanian but I ended up laughing myself comatose as a tittering sextet of female Reticulans ravished me in a cocoon of rotating blades that recalled a giant eggbeater. It was a nightmare like I said, a bright kaleidoscoped horrorfest that lasted a decade.

I didn't think I'd ever get out of there alive but I did. I'm not sure why they let me go. Maybe they thought I didn't have enough celebrity points to warrant a permanent berth on the mother ship. They left me where they'd found me. Or rather, where they'd abducted me. I came awake to a chill desert dawn, with the sun spreading a fine layer of gold on the mesas ranged around. I felt like a revenant, like I'd returned from the dead after eons of maggot-ridden entombment. And yet, little had changed that I could tell. I was wearing the same clothes, the same shoes, the same everything.

I didn't stop to think about it. I rose to my feet and started walking, back towards the highway and the nearest town. I knew, even as I walked, that the old life was dead and gone, that a new one would have to be birthed ex nihilo, out of nothing. I figured I was going to have to quit flogging ogres in extremis but I wasn't quite sure.

I was thinking about it in an Arizona flophouse when there was a knock on my door and three suited Feds walked in. I knew they were Feds by the way they were dressed and by their aura of subtle arrogance, the kind you acquire when Uncle Sam grants you a monopoly on violence. We know all about you Zorn, they said. We know about the people you've killed and we know where you've been for the last ten years. You killed nearabout two hundred men before the Visitors took you. You should be getting juiced in an electric chair this very minute but we've decided to leave you be.

There IS a condition though, they said. We need an assurance you're going to hang up your little flogging whip. No more killing. You start that shit again we'll come after you so fast you won't know what hit you. I smiled at that one. I can live with that fellas. No cause for worry. You hear that rustling sound? That's me turning over a new leaf. They stared down at me a minute, three pairs of freezing blue eyes fixed in scrutiny. Then they turned and walked out single file.

I never saw them again, mainly because I didn't give them cause to reappear. I returned to Pine Ridge soon afterwards and burned my flogger's knout on a patch of sacred ground. I stuck around on the rez for a while, waiting for the Call. The Call of a new path, a new life. It came six months later and I left the rez once more, wandering the country in search of weirdos. I found them of course. Found them and recorded their stories. Some of those stories were sent to Alien Wreckage but the rest are with me in this Dixie log cabin where I live now. They've remained in storage long enough. Time to dust them off and set them free here, in this space, where they belong.

I, Zorn: Part Two (The Flogger's Art)

I'm going to finish it quick now. Finish talking about myself in fast, disdainful strokes. Dismissive strokes. I'll dip my quill in a superheated stew of pitted prunes, sun-baked herring, coagulated hogblood and brain fluid drawn from the skull of a schizoid, octogenarian Southern Baptist . Then I'll blitz it out in a rush of hypnopompic automatism.

I don't want to dwell on myself like I said. This here is just a preamble, a way to frame the stories I'm about to present. I've chosen three weirdos to begin with. Three visionary revenants weaving bizarre, transmontaine narratives. The narratives will unfold in rotational collage, one following the other in uroboric succession, whatever the hell that means.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Best to get this over with first, sans ado. I ought to talk about my name here at the outset. People call me Zorn or Zorn Altheus but that's not all there is to it. It's never that simple, not at this end of the alimentary canal where the sun never shines, where crud dries in concentric rings and critters die soundless and asphyxiate.

My name, in its resplendent entirety, is Zorn Altheus Blue Vajra Cacodaemon Dancing Bear. My old lady used to be a sci fi enthusiast back on the rez, in happier times when she ran youthful and sunblessed under the Dakota sky. She read every bit of sci fi schlock she could get her hands on. One of her dog-eared, moth-eaten paperbacks featured an intergalactic superhero named Zorn Altheus.

Zorn saved the Proteron galaxy from utter destruction and killed Rruothkarr, scion of the insect people of Minraud and sith lord of the Ariguan Confederacy. Zorn died in the end, not from injuries sustained in battle but from chronic constipation caused by frequent trips across poorly maintained Einstein Rosen Bridges, also known as Wormholes. Zorn learned too late that a clogged wormhole will kill you faster than all the laser scimitars of an alien enemy.

My old lady adored Zorn Altheus, so she named me after him. Dancing Bear happens to be my Lakota family name, the one my old man gave me before crossing the mystic bourne in a flaming nimbus of blood and murder. The names Blue Vajra and Cacodaemon came to me during a sweat lodge vision quest supervised by Theodore Running Wolf.

I changed shape during that vision quest. I morphed into an eagle with golden wings and eyes of fire. I flew over the Black Hills in the shadow of Crazy Horse and rose in a tremendous soaring arc to the crest of the Himalayas where I communed with a troglodyte Yeti who I later learned was the immortal Hindu monkey god Hanuman.

It was Hanuman who blessed me with the name Blue Vajra. Later, as I coasted on chill wind-currents over an expanse of fulgent ice, a hooded manitou appeared on the horizon, pointed with a gnarled finger and said: Cacodaemon. Thus I emerged from the erotogoric abysm of my vision quest with a new name: Zorn Altheus Blue Vajra Cacodaemon Dancing Bear.

The new name came with a new purpose, the nomadic death-telos that Theodore Running Wolf had divined with his Orbis Tertius back at the rez. I wandered in deference to my new purpose, flogging and flaying the ogres who crossed my path. I covered much of the continental United States over a six year period with brief forays into Canada.

I lost track of the number of men I shredded and killed. Later, some of my abductors insisted I had murdered well over two hundred men between the ages of thirty and fifty. I take strong exception to the word 'murder'. I didn't murder those men. The Lord's Prayer says: deliver us from evil. That's what I did. I delivered those men and their victims from evil.

The men I flogged to extinction in sprays of consubstantiate gore were ogres, irredeemable tormentors of women and children. The men I shredded were nameless then and are nameless now. I didn't know who they were but I recognized them in a manner of speaking. I saw with perfect clarity that they were monsters who secretly yearned for the fate that awaited them.

I identified them via mantic apperception, the mindsight I had acquired under Running Wolf's guidance. I located them, isolated them and disintegrated them. Then I excised their scrota, stored them in mason jars of formaldehyde and moved on. Once every month I scooped those nuts out of their sacks, inserted colored light bulbs and created luminous scrotal pastiches on outhouse walls. I am an artist as I said.

I stuck to back roads and small towns, moving patient and unhurried. I never worked to stay alive. People helped me wherever I went, gladly vouchsafing to me that which I sought. They didn't help me because they chose to. They helped because I bent their will to my own with a glance or a word. It's easy to bend people to your purpose. You have to know how, is all. You have to stun their pineal glands with gestures and words directed with fierce intent, in a dense beam of pranic energy.

Your pineal gland is located between your eyebrows, in case you didn't know. I can stun your pineal gland with a gesture, a sound, a word or all three in conjunction. The specific combination changes with each person. One time I stunned a scrofulous prison warden by slapping my left tit, tweaking my right nipple and putting out a high-pitched squawk. Overkill, as it turned out. The man dropped like a sack of wet cement, his eyeballs capsizing white.

In my seventh year of wandering I joined a travelling carnival run by a goitred and flatulent Australian who once ran a brothel on the Thai Cambodian border. I figured the carnival would provide cover for my activities which indeed it did. Even serial-flogging paladins like myself need protection sometimes.

My knife-throwing skills were put to good use at the carnival, skills I'd picked up on the rez. I also learned to juggle a variety of disparate and dangerous objects: burning torches, active chainsaws, coils of livewire, bowling balls, milking stools and huge genetically modified rodents that bit my hands and delivered squeaking apostrophes of furious protest as I juggled their steroid pumped bodies.

I continued meanwhile to troll for ogres, locating them as before and shearing the flesh off their bones as they screamed soundless, their torment accruing about their bodies in phosphorescent aurora. While at the carnival I married a three hundred pound woman with a silver mohawk on her misshapen skull, a green patch on her missing eye and a flowing red beard on her absent chin.

Why I chose her in particular is not clear to me now, in retrospect. I could've had any man, woman or hermaphrodite I wanted, given my stellar good looks, my cyclopean nether appendage and my tangible aura of pathic self-assurance. It's possible that I married Bertha in a paroxysm of penitence for my crimes. In belated spasms of bogus guilt and Sartrean bad faith. Even natural born serial killers get the pangs on occasion.

The marriage did, nevertheless, offer certain deviant rewards. Our emperor waterbed quickly became the mise en scene for feral, bone-crushing, pudendal fusions that lit up the carnival in weird fulgor as squeals and grunts rent the night. Bertha wasn't so much a person as a plenum, a boiling adipose swamp of subterranean lusts, bestial ruts, cannibal debauches, howling saturnales and blood-drenched orgies of corybantic delirium beneath the glans of a purple moon.

Chances are, I'd still be a travelling carny Indian if Bertha had survived. But she didn't survive. She died of an aneurysm in front of a cheering crowd on a chill winter night in Arkansas. Her sudden and unceremonious passing affected me in ways I couldn't have imagined. The calescent intensity of my grief softened my heart, reshaped my spirit, turned the compass needle of my quiddity.

I left the carnival a week after her demise, intent on resuming my life of solitary wandering and serial assassination. The frequency of my crimes had waned during my marriage to Bertha. And for a while the killings had ceased altogether. The barbarous delights of the flogger's art had yielded to the incendiary catharses of copulation. Eros reigned in place of an extrovert Thanatos and Lordy's Love Whip lay unused at last, its rawhide strands curled limp and forlorn, its gleaming drail hooks piled mute.

But now I took up the knout once more, eager to make up for lost time. I wished to embark on an unparalleled flogging spree, to flay my way across the country in deranged afflatus. But it was not to be. Somehow I couldn't summon the nerve. Something had changed. Prolonged communion with Big Bertha had leached and gutted me, blunted my resolve. My flogger's fortitude had ebbed to the point of extinction. I thought of killing myself but I didn't. I wandered adrift, going where my feet took me.

I started to feel it a month into my aimless walkabout. Feel like I was being watched. At first I figured maybe I had a stalker but no. The feeling persisted even when I was completely alone, miles from human habitation. I can't render with certainty what happened to me next. I remember most of it well but I can't vouch for its authenticity. It's possible that I lapsed into some form of delusional psychosis that lasted a long time. It's also possible that my abductors permanently distorted my recollection of capture and internment. I'll let my readers decide.

I entered the state of New Mexico sometime in the spring of nineteen hundred and seventy two. I'd left the carnival in Aintree, Georgia and hitchhiked west, along the southern route. I hit New Mexico on a Friday as I recall, an hour before nightfall. I followed the highway for a while looking to thumb a ride. But trucks and cars weren't stopping so I left the highway and headed north, into the badlands.

I'm not sure why I left the highway. It was an obscure impulse, a sudden yearning for solitude, for abnegation. It occurred to me much later that it wasn't so much an impulse as a command. I'd been led, driven by external volition. The landscape changed colors as I walked, distant mesas going from burnt sienna to tahitian bronze to blood red under a cyanic blue sky yielding to darkness.

Soon it was completely dark, the mesas bulked in silhouette under a bright smatter of stars. I remember stumbling at some point, stumbling and falling from fatigue and hunger. There was light when I came to. A circle of brilliant white light beaming down from above. I couldn't discern the light source but the creatures standing in the circle were clear enough. I say 'creatures' because some of them were human and some were not.

Five of the eight creatures were aliens of the kind you see in movies. They were short, pale and slender with large domed heads, black panoptic eyes, vestigial noses, slit mouths and absent ears. The remaining three were human. Not just human. They were famous and supposedly dead. The first was Elvis Presley in full stage regalia. The second was James Dean in black leather. The third was martial arts legend Bruce Lee in a blue kung fu suit. Just the people I wanted to see.

Concluded in Part Three.

I, Zorn: Part One (Lordy's Love Whip)

I guess I ought to say a little more about myself before I get to my fellow weirdos. I don't like talking about myself if truth be told. The last guy who made me do it got a foot jammed up his butt. I stuck my bare foot so far up his croup, we had to be driven to the hospital where they mistook us for conjoined twins. The dude was a cop who stopped me on the highway. He interrogated me, forced me to talk about myself, so I responded with my foot. I tickled his tonsils with my toes all the way to the hospital, my knee shaping a bump under his ribs.

There's a reason I don't like to talk about myself. The reason being: I get confused. I mean I start to get confused when I talk about myself. I start to think I'm someone else. I've been told I have multiple personality disorder or some version of it. Some days I'm convinced I'm a large, aggressive Haitian woman named Marie Therese Duvalier. This gal Marie is an accomplished Santeria priestess and lives in a log cabin up near Anchorage Alaska.

For those who don't know, Santeria is a bona fide American religion, a blend of African spirituality and Catholicism, too bad for African spirituality. Marie is a Santeria priestess who earns her keep by rolfing loggers and mountain men. Rolfing is a type of deep tissue massage invented by a bony, antisocial invert named Rolf. Rolfing has nothing to do with Santeria but Marie's good at it, can rolf your muscles to warm mush in minutes.

Sometimes I wake up naked on the floor at dawn convinced I'm Marie Therese Duvalier. Other times I wake up with a loud whinnying sound, convinced I'm a Mexican-Irish migrant laborer named Hernan Calderon O'Hanlon. This guy Hernan masturbates horses at a West Texas stud farm. I mean that's how he earns his living. Sometimes thoroughbreds don't mate like they should so the females have to be artificially inseminated with jizz jerked off the males. The job sucks like a bionic porn star but someone has to do it so that's what Hernan does.

I become Marie and Hernan when I'm confused and I get confused when I talk about myself so that's why I don't like to do it, but I guess I'm going to have to, here. A man's got to introduce himself before introducing his friends, you dig. And you folks out there ought to have a fair idea who you're dealing with. I don't want to be accused of misrepresenting myself to the great unwashed. I do aim to keep it brief though. I'm not here to put myself on display. I'm here to present a bunch of weird genuises and their whacked out stories.

I was born back in nineteen hundred and forty two and that's the tragedy entire, in a nutshell. If I hadn't been born I wouldn't be here wishing I'd never been born. My mother was Native American, a Lakota full-blood from the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. My real father, also Lakota, died when I was two, murdered by agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Five years later a weird-looking preacher came to the rez, a white man named Gilson Reilly. He came to civilize us heathens with the support and approval of the Feds, same shit different century.

This guy Reilly was a hellfire and brimstone type, preached up a storm in the local church. He'd stagger around the pulpit foaming at the mouth and gibbering in tongues while we sat in the pews weeping with laughter. The sermons ended with him thrashing about on the floor, pissing and farting as his voice rose to a shriek. The man looked and sounded like an albino buzzard but my mother married him anyway. It's taken me fifty years to forgive her for that. It wasn't her fault if truth be told. She pretty much lost her mind after my old man died. His violent extinction caused a meltdown in her head and left a void that Gilson Reilly filled.

Next thing I knew, we were in this shitty little Texas town named Howaxahoochee, stuck in a shitty little house by the railway tracks. By 'we', I mean Reilly, my old lady and myself. I was eight when we moved there and sixteen when I finally left, eight years of pure hell, worse than the Hell Reilly talked up in his sermons. The abuse began soon after we moved there and didn't stop till I slaughtered his sorry ass eight years later. When I say 'abuse' I'm being euphemistic. Torture is what it was, the kind you work with whips, chains and branding irons.

It wasn't just me catching hell. My old lady caught her fair share. She even asked for more, hoping to spare me some. But Reilly was pretty democratic with his affections, an equal opportunity sadist. My old lady tried and failed to escape with me a few times, which only made things worse. A month after my sixteenth birthday I walked into the living room and found him muttering over his bible with one hand in his crotch. He used to let me walk around the house then, figuring I was too cowed to escape.

Your mother's gone, he said, she ain't comin' back. Gone, I said, gone where. He laughed high-pitched and catarrhal, his fangs showing yellow. Gone, he repeated, she ain't comin' back. I knew then that he'd killed her. I was sure of it. I didn't know where she was or how he'd done it but it didn't matter. What mattered was the weird light in my head, between my eyebrows. I went down to the basement and found the clown suit I'd seen there once. Then I went up to his room and found his shotgun. He never figured I'd be brazen enough to do that. I didn't either. I'd sneaked into his room once years back and he'd found me and damn near killed me.

But I wasn't afraid anymore. My head was like a butcher's freezer, my thoughts in arctic suspension. I walked into the living room in my new clown suit, shotgun in hand. Whut the HALE you think you doin' boy, he asked, his lipless mouth twisting in a snarl. I proceeded to show him. Show him what I was thinking. I took my time with it, really savored it. I used the gun to hold him in place while I trussed him up like a turkey. Then I dipped a sock in gasoline, jammed it in his mouth and went to work.

I used everything he'd used on us but I singled out the branding irons for special application. That and the flogging knout he liked to call Lordy's Love Whip. I see it now as I saw it then. Reilly screaming like the pope in that Franis Bacon painting, his eyes bugging blue-veined, gasoline spit dribbling from the sock in his mouth. His scalp seemed to whiten as I worked him over, fine lines of blood forming in dark filigree. I was the happiest I'd ever been and I wept in spasms of orgasmic release, hot salt tears running into my mouth gaped open in soundless laughter.

Reilly kept nodding out through the night but I roused him with the smelling salts he used before his sermons. Everything works in your favor when you have a purpose. It was near dawn when I finished with him. I'd started on him an hour past sundown and worked steady through the night. I should've been exhausted but I wasn't. I was shaking with nervous energy, my vengeance burning white in fulgent crucifixion. The wall behind him was bare when I began. It looked like a lurid expressionist mural when I got done, its surface streaked and blotched with bits of flesh, bone and blood.

I stared at that mural a while, entranced. Then I struck a match and set fire to the sock in Reilly's mouth. The house was a ball of flame when I left it an hour later. My old lady's corpse was in there somewhere but I didn't look back. I walked out of town with Reilly's money in my pocket and a bag over my shoulder. The bag held some of my essentials and sandwiches I'd packed for the road. It also held Lordy's Love Whip, the flogging knout I'd wielded all night in ecstatic catharsis.

I hitch-hiked to Dallas and took a bus north. Five days later I was in South Dakota, heading into the Pine Ridge reservation. I stayed on the rez for the next three years fully expecting to be apprehended by the state police. But the cops didn't come and I remained in hiding as I studied with a medicine man named Theodore Running Wolf. Under Running Wolf's guidance I discovered abilities I never dreamed I had. Psychic abilities and spirit powers that'd lain dormant, awaiting their summons.

I awoke one morning under a blue Dakota sky and found Running Wolf standing over me. You got to go, he said, it's time. The cops, I said, they're here. No cops, he said, you're done learning. Time for you to head out. Head out where, I asked. He gave me a strange look, his old man's eyes bright with sapience. You know where to go, he said, and you know what to do. I'd ask you not to do what you're gonna do if I thought it'd make a difference. But it ain't gonna make no difference. You gonna do it anyway. It's what you was born to do.

I left the rez that same day with a knapsack on my back. The sack held everything a drifter might need. It also held Reilly's flogging knout, the one I'd killed him with. I wandered the country over the next six years locating my victims and flogging them dead. I say 'victims' but they weren't victims. They were monsters of Reilly's ilk, wife-beaters and child-torturers every last one. I never had any trouble finding them. I could tell who they were just by looking. You'd be surprised how many of them there are in this country, new ones sprouting up every day.

I flogged them dead with Lordy's Love Whip and left no trace. If you check police records you'll see their faces under Missing. Serial killers tend to slip up at some point, but I never did. My crimes were bloody but always perfect. Perfection is hard to achieve when you're flaying grown men dead but I did achieve it. I said I was a genius and it's true. I'm a born genius with pronounced shamanic talents and I used those talents to deadly effect, just like I was supposed to. Old Running Wolf had been right as always. This shit was my personal telos, my raison d'etre. It's what I lived for, what I was born to do.

Introduction: Weirdos

People collect all kinds of crap. I knew a guy named Wedge who collected his toe nails and stuck them together with gunk from his ears. Now he’s got this giant sphere of toenails glued with earwax. I knew another guy named Gleet who collected used condoms from the local trash dump. He filled the condoms with crank case oil, mounted them on used chopsticks and stuck them out in his backyard. He was also a chopstick collecter, natch. Now he’s got a small forest of dirty pennants in his backyard, a demented memorial for America's war-dead.

There was this other guy, a roadhouse midget named Shortcake. Rednecks at the roadhouse liked to stick a harness on Shortcake and toss him down a greased ramp. That’s how good old boys entertain themselves out in the boonies. But Shortcake knew how to get back at his tossers. He’d ambush them in the parking lot after they were good and drunk. He’d knock them cold with a lead-filled baseball and slice off their earlobes with a rusted scalpel.

Shortcake was an earlobe collector and an artist. Back in his trailerpark atelier he’d dip those earlobes in colored glue and paste them to a large canvas. The result always put me in mind of Van Gogh. A trailer trash Van Gogh on speed and acid. Shortcake was a psychopath for sure though not a particularly dangerous one. I knew he was a psychopath because I was one too, still am. It takes one to know one as they say.

We got along like a house on fire with a cannibal fuckfest raging inside. I mean me and Shortcake did. I was a psychopath like he was and I was an artist like he was. I'm still an artist of sorts, though I don’t do the kind of art I used to back then. We had a third thing in common. I was a collector like he was except I didn’t collect earlobes. I collected the nutsacks of guys I killed and disintegrated. I collected the scrotums (scrota) of the child-torturers and wife-beaters I slaughtered and shredded for the sake of art and humanity. But I don’t collect scrotums anymore. I collect weirdos is what I do now.

I locate genuinely strange people and get them to tell me their stories. I record their stories and collect them. It’s my life’s work now, something I love to do. It’s spiritually rewarding and I make a decent living off it, can’t ask for much more. I do yearn for the old days sometimes when I was flaying the flesh of evil men and transfiguring their death-torment through art. But I can’t go back to that. I’m old now for one thing, sixty four years old, though I look about forty four. And I made a deal with Uncle Sam. No more killing now Zorn, they said, you start that shit again, we're gonna come after you hard and fast. Okay fellas, I said, no more of that, I promise to be a decent law-abiding citizen.

And that’s what I am. A decent, law-abiding citizen who lives alone in a Dixie log cabin and records weird stories for a living. Some of the stuff I record goes straight to Alien Wreckage, a popular print magazine that features UFO’s, werewolves, vampires, zombies and such. They pay me pretty well for the stuff I send them because it’s always compelling and because the founder/editor of Alien Wreckage knows I’m a former serial killer, the most noble and esthetically refined serial flogger of all time. The man digs and respects me, what can I say.

He also knows I keep the best material for myself. He says we’d make millions if we published that material in book form but I’m not interested. I respect my weirdos too much. They don’t deserve to be sold out for a bag of filthy lucre. The people whose stories I keep in storage aren’t just weirdos. They’re geniuses and prophets. They’re the most extraordinary people in North America and among the most extraordinary on planet earth. I paid them for the stories they told me, paid them well. But they didn’t give a fiddler's fuck about that. They would’ve told me their stories for free, only because they recognized I was one of them. They saw I was a fellow weirdo, a fellow prophet, a fellow genius. That’s the only reason they talked to me and I’m honored that they did.

I was going to have their stories published post mortem, after we were all dead and gone, every one of us. But I’ve changed my mind about that. I’m going to feature their stories here, in this space, for everyone to read. I decided to put them here because of the times we’re living in. We’ve got us a country run by fascist assholes bent on devouring the planet. We’ve got us a planet that’s near dead from being gang-raped by corporate pigs. We’ve got us a legion of media whores drooling lies as they fellate the Man.

The grand inquisitors of consensus reality have failed us. What we need now are voices from the margins. We need prophets speaking to us from beyond the pale. We need purveyors of Chaos Magick and Crazy Wisdom. The stories presented here are visions. Bizarre, phantasmagoric visions rendered in words. They’re testimonials of the sort rhymed by the Ancient Mariner. Readers will be tempted to dismiss them as mere lunatic ravings. That temptation should be resisted. Judgement should be reserved. Some of these stories may be literally true. Others may serve to enlighten, to point us out of the nightmare of the present age. If that's good enough for me it ought to be good enough for you.