He Said I was ‘Midnight’… a ‘black soul spawned in The Well of *Inequity’ by my ‘idol worshipping’ Catholic parents, and brought to his pure Christian enclave to tempt his weak son with evil. His name was Mister Mick, a compulsively violent man of no great intelligence who had joined an evangelic Christian cult in his crazed attempt at self-improvement. He hated me, and was troubled that his son, Hug, had befriended me.

Mister Mick, like the other inhabitants of this rural town that my father had moved us to in the mid-1970s, had Baltimore hopelessly confused with Boston, just one big evil sea-side city. Few students in my advanced placement history class could even go to the world map at the head of Mister Art’s class and pick out our new hometown, no less that wretched waterfront den from which my father had brought us up into those hallowed hills of protestant purity.

Granted, there was plenty wrong with the Teenage Me. I was on the dark side psychologically and was almost as violent as Mister Mick, but not nearly so big, loud and intimidating. Eventually, as a term of his continued friendship with the satanic Teenage Me, Hug, was directed to save me, my soul to be exact. I was told that this would result in me being among the chosen who would be picked up by the angels [which were watching us, disguised as they were as UFOs] when the ‘Rapture’ came and all of our ‘unsaved’ friends and family members were burned up in the war between Jesus and the Antichrist.

I decided to go to Hug’s bible study at his church, which looked eerily postmodern. Our mutual friend Rick tried to warn me under the tree-line between his evil stepfather’s frame house and Hug’s psycho-dad’s brick ranch house, “Dude, they believe in UFOs man! And do you really want to leave your family to burn while you go up with Jesus! Besides, their music sucks! Have you heard his [Hug’s] Osmond’s album—it’s all he’s allowed to listen to man!”

I was unshaken in my new faith, although it, as yet, merely loomed on the horizon, “I know man, but Marie Osmond is a babe! They’ve got Marie Osmond in a church basement somewhere! I need to investigate and see if they got any Marie Osmond forgeries at this church.”

Rick was aghast, “Dude, you would screw a Christian chick?”

“Yeah, so?”

“You’re gross man—and if you do her in the missionary position we’re not friends!”

A few nights later, or maybe the very same one, I was in that church basement with a bunch of Christian kids and this big fat man in a suit with his arm wrapped round me as they kneeled and prayed for my soul and tried to drive out the black demon that possessed me. I could feel the pressure, like I was a diver with the bends in one of those Sea Hunt novels I used to read in special ed. class back in Baltimore.

I was wondering if this was worth a shot at that cute blonde in the corner, peaking at me while everyone else had their eyes closed to slay my demon—she didn’t even look a little bit like Marie Osmond. Besides; back in The Well of Inequity I was in special ed. Class—a functional retard. But in this town, I found myself in an advanced placement course. Could I really trust anyone of the local’s power of deductive reasoning, let alone their theological acumen?

The blonde girl was cute though; her hair almost orange in the bright white church light.

….I stood up, shook my head ‘no’ and the man patted me on the back, “That’s alright son, you’ll be in my prayers regardless. We’ll always be here for you.”

The next day under the tree-line Rick was empathetic, “Yeah man, when they all start praying for you like you’re some old person dying, that’s creepy.”

We then began discussing our ideal girl. That was a question I always had trouble with, but not Rick, “A black Olympic gymnast with red hair!”

I don’t know if Rick ever met her. But I often wonder if she turned out to be a Baptist.

Eventually, a few years later, I nearly killed Hug when he showed signs of his father’s penchant for violence. To avoid a law suit at the hands of Mister Mick, who apparently needed subsidies for his UFO friends, I fled back to The Well of Inequity, where, so he had told me, I had been ‘spawned’.

For some reason, last night, at about 11:30, as I walked past a public park, in Baltimore County, I was thinking about Rick, and Hug, probably because I had seen another Marie Osmond diet commercial. Then my formless reverie was interrupted by a voice as demanding as Mister Mick’s, but in a very different dialect, “Yo, give me a cigarette!”

I looked to my left and saw a young man holding hands with a girl, and recalled that the last time this demand had been made of me in that tone, that I was the one with the girl, and I was trying to get close enough to stab him before he got the gun out of his waistband. There was a time, perhaps ten years in my past, when I would have gone into that park to confront him for demanding anything of me. But now, I’m a mellow old buzzard, and I just pretended not to hear as he escalated his demands, and then they turned to pleas, and finally to insults while I continued on my way.

I am human though. It does bother me when a man a third my age tries to engineer a physical confrontation with me, so that he can ‘punk me out’ in front of his worshipper. Dealing with such emotions, and stuffing them down inside, is probably tough for all of us. However, as a writer, I can cheat my involuntary upwelling emotions of the power to do me harm.

My darkest villain/protagonist in the Sunset Saga is Randy Bracken. Randy is based on my old friend Rick [40%]; Slam, a former white supremacist leader and Hindu convert [40%], and my darkest thoughts [20%]. Randy was raised in Wheeling West Virginia [20 miles from Hug’s hometown] by his hate-filled grandfather who is based on Mister Mick. Randy even refers to Baltimore, and to a particular Eastside fast-food location, as ‘The Well of Inequity.’

This is the power of fiction to cleanse the mind. I was looking for a first chapter to Randy’s next adventure. Now I think it will be in a darkened park, lighting a cigarette for his next abduction—Randy happens to be a time-traveler, charged with abducting geniuses out of the past. He is also a criminal who uses his awesome transportation device to obtain illicit drugs before they were illicit. Randy is, additionally, a paranoid psychopath, and he goes nowhere, particularly into a war zone, without a human shield.

Thanks Yo. I hope you enjoy the Siege of Syracuse in 212 B.C.

8/31/12

* I think Mister Mick meant iniquity as in wickedness, not inequity as in unjust. I do remember him sounding out the 'e'. That makes Randy Bracken's hated burger joint [see the Sunset Saga novel Den of The Ender] doubly meaningful; since it is to him wicked, and to the locals a meeting place where they discuss the unjust society they resent, which he caricatures with the use of his Pap's mispronounced use of the term for wickedness.