M. F. KORN has written eleven novels and had over 190 story appearances in magazines worldwide. As well, currently available are the two paperback collections: CONFESSIONS OF A GHOUL AND OTHER STORIES and ALIENS, MINIBIKES, AND OTHER STAPLES OF SUBURBIA. He resides in Louisiana as a programmer with a degree in Computer Science, and has a daughter, Savannah, four years old. Mike also has a degree in Piano and enjoys playing Rachmaninoff, Gershwin, Chopin and ragtime, and listening to Requiems, Sacred Masses for the Dead.
To learn more about M. F. Korn, check out his official site at http://members.aol.com/tiresius1/tiresius1/
Chapter One
It was not even noon this time.
The college boys were gorging themselves on cheap draft. "Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother" resounded from the perched deejay’s stereo. The White Horse Tavern was an unassuming college bar with no redeeming values.
"Harrison! Alright!" his fraternity brothers yelled at him.
A cacophony antiphonal. Twelve-tone dissonance. Ricky Harrison sidled up to the bar next to his big brother in the fraternity, Atkinson. The guy was a basketball wonder, but much more, a deft womanizer.
Atkinson, whose free arm draped about an aquiline Tri-Delt, pushed Ricky’s first draft into his hand. She was raven-haired, gorgeous, and high on cocaine. She had that neon look in her eyes and a glowing visceral beauty that seemed enhanced by the drug. Karrie Capshaw was being snaked at the moment. She was someone else’s girlfriend; the someone else was a beast of a man, covered in hair. No one knew exactly what year he was. Ricky remembered, at one of the Tigerland bars, this boyfriend downed a pitcher of beer in one gulp. They had watched in amazement as he did it.
But now, Ricky was driven by "Do it! Do it! Do it!" which they chanted drunkenly. Ricky looked at Atkinson’s bronzed countenance. His blond bangs flopped in his clown face.
"You got a lot a catching up to do, Harrison!"
He raised the beer and killed it in three gulps.
The milling crowd stood, chattering about the most interesting tidbits known to modern man. The pinball machines rocked back and forth. Lights flashed crazily. The pool tables were stacked with quarters. Many more beers were drunk by these students just finishing final exams.
Atkinson’s best friend, Tomer, haggled over two freshman girls whose problem was how to explain to daddy that they were flunking out of college in the worst way. A Theta girl grappled a Kappa Alpha guy while he was trying to sink the eight ball.
Karrie sipped a fresh brew and smiled beauteously at Ricky. "Is she vaguely attracted to me?" he thought. "Or is the alcohol being taken into her system and the edge of the cocaine is wearing down smooth, mollifying this gorgeous creature into some lulling relaxation? Or she could have downed a Quaalude?"
Atkinson had informed him she liked those. Ricky looked at her cream complexion and thought, "the genitals of the Divine."
If only Ricky could take for his own that smoldering charm she was thrusting his way outside the comprehension of Atkinson, who was busy trying to order five more beers.
There was nothing more fulfilling than to get raucously plastered and sleep off the dulcet sweet afternoon of semesters that meant rites of passage for many of his disco-death generation. Rock and roll blasted out carrion in decibel belches of sound. What was her name again? Carrie? Carrie Capshaw? Or was it Karrie?
Atkinson made his way to the troughs through the hall leading to the condom machines. One fellow was crapping in the sink. A Deke from New Orleans who casually sipped his draft while the other men were at the troughs.
A few months earlier, Ricky had gone to class, the collegiate circus in which to wallow in his languid anonymity, through the miasma of the quadrangle and the hoards of lovely students, to electrical engineering courses which he loathed with a passion unparalleled in the history of the race of Man. He was not a Frat Rat, not an intellectual, at least he didn’t think so, but a number, a social security code in the magnum opus mainframe com-puter in one of the looming structures of a campus in Louisiana where things were happening for others but not him. His life was unsatisfying.
He knew he was only twenty years old, but he felt the dying of his insides when he thought about the dissipation of his old gangs from high school. The rigors of prep Catholic school under the tutelage of the broth-ers of the Sacred Heart. Here, he was knowing not one iota was spent to urge him to higher grades. No one but his family cared whether he dropped out, resigned, or even dropped off the face of the Earth. He was a sopho-more with blond hair, rakishly good looking but much too sensitive and shy. Too aesthetic to be understood by the collegiate mindset. He was rooming in the South Stadium. There under the bowels of the roman coliseum he had often studied while the football games played on. The Fighting Tigers of LSU screamed on to victory while he was interested in playing ragtime and Science Fiction.
He couldn’t wait for summer break, even though there were prob-lems at home in the manicured suburbs of Sherwood Forest. He had grown up shrouded from the real world. The white bread existence of going to the country club with his friends every day to play nine holes, though no one cold really ever brag about hitting a decent shot. Or playing touch football on people’s lawns and basketball until one was swooning with heart palpita-tions. All this in the motherly security of the quiet streets of Sherbrook Drive. But his brother, a national merit finalist, had had a heart attack and summarily quit high school. He often stayed locked up in his room like a quiet somnambulist martyr, a hermit. The mystery of the neighborhood. The old gang had broken up. The neighborhood parties, the high school camp outs, the activities had gone, like ether in a strong wind.
He had lost his bearings and was self-destructing. Ricky Harrison, son of Richard and Marlene Harrison. Amway high rollers and purchasing agent at Dow Chemical for the last twenty years. A nice house, a dachshund named Schroeder, two sisters, one older, one younger. The brother who was in terminal decline, leading to his mother’s instability and heartache. Why was he, Ricky, the middle boy, bothering to go to college?
He had worked construction a couple of summers before, once at Dow Chemical and once at Exxon. Baton Rouge was purported to have the cleanest water in the state, because of a water ledge. The whole of the Mis-sissippi River banks from below New Orleans down south to way above Baton Rouge all the way to St. Francisville, were a huge conglomeration of refineries, oil and chemical companies. The purveyors of pollution and smells and bad air of noxious chlorine spills, oil leakage. Devil’s Swamp was the big sewage dump here. Murky leagues of tepid, caustic Mississippi wa-ter. The winding marvelous river that Mark Twain once wrote about, dot-ted and closely edged by these places for more than fifty years. That Missis-sippi mud was now full of petrochemicals and napalm probably, Ricky thought.
But he felt free out at the tank farms. The miles of tanks and pipe and steel and valves and men who didn’t care that anybody was a college boy and all that. It was a long stretch from prep school with young men being built into behemoths both spiritually and mentally — to the hot broiling Louisiana sun in the various chemical blocks of mind-boggling pipe bent to right angles and the leather-necked welders and pipe fitters of the unions. The north Baton Rouge men, the Denham Springs rednecks, were closer to God down there in the mazes of steel and rust and what man hath wrought in his quest for making plastics.
Ricky remembered good times. Taking girls up on the levee right there in the pastures of brown and gold, near the LSU practice fields. There wasn’t much stench in the air then. But there was a distance between the liberal atmosphere of cigar-smoking philosophy professors and the leatherneck denizens toting lunch buckets through iron gates. In the heart of each man, they had their own story to tell; each was busy going about the business of getting that elusive degree. And here Rick used to stay in his dorm late at night underneath 80,000 screaming drunken fans in purple in gold. Trying to write a science fiction story. He had looked many times out the window and seen masses of cars in the parking lot. He had thought about his ex-girlfriend that had dumped him for no good reason, and that she was dating other guys. He was alone and had threads of sentimentality. Now he was dating little coeds with gullets enabling them to imbibe beers along Tigerland bar hops; thriving in the social circles of the campus. Everyone was repre-sented: the Asians, Germans, Africans, and the estranged hippies who still harangued about the campus pitching forth their views on anarchism. He wallowed in the backwash of the milling crowds who moved ahead, while he stood still.
He didn’t want to be anywhere in particular. He had lived in this bustling industrial city all his life. He knew there was a world out there. He felt dwarfed by the muscle bound mature men whom he dwindled under so mercilessly. The girls were all well evidenced in their Seventies ways. The intelligentsia of the colleges was rampant with idealism, free thought, free love, anarchy. This didn’t flow with the heartbeat of the suburban and seg-regated city. North Baton Rouge had the generations of old and young, all working the refineries. It also had suburbs of Yuppies, upper middle classes stretched all the way to the Amite River. Beyond that lay the rednecks who didn’t want to be a part of the city whatsoever.
Where had his life gone? He lost his true love. He fought against every principle that he believed in; he was a mess. A chaotic maelstrom engulfed his hubris.
He was on his own. Every once in a while he traipsed over gnarly oak tree roots beyond the quadrangle and library to fulfill his earnest inter-est in attempting to play ragtime; his anachronistic piano studies kept that one spark in him alive. He was young and full of dreams, but he realized he might be slowly squelching them.
Finally the semester was almost over and he could once again strive to get gainful employment at those stinking holes of plastics and chemicals. Go down in there and make seven dollars an hour, righteous bucks for a man with jumbled up ideas in his head.
His days of finals were over; he wandered through them without remembered a syllable later. His days of learning stuff like that were prob-ably over. He went through the motions of studying the circuits and elec-tromagnetism. There were whizzes that memorized circuit designs far better than he could. They called this state a sportsman’s paradise, but Ricky had seen suburbs transposed alongside malls and urban blights. And ugly streets that made up the smallish Baton Rouge metro area. There was a garden district, but there was also a pollution quotient of immeasurable proportions.
There used to be a time when there were only a couple of high schools; now there were quite a few. Now they pushed forth seventies wast-rels in packs, legions, and throngs of cliques that would basically intermix in the large university. Now, Ricky was missing the breakup of the old gang. The few friends he really hung around with were now pairing off with the girl of their choice; creating lives for themselves. But Ricky Harrison was a long figure struggling to pass classes, though he was once promising. The beer drinking in the morning and pot smoking days with fraternity mem-bers was sure sign of a total turnaround. Rebellion was quite evident. He pushed against the current, the eddies of students. He could feel himself lost in the crowds of students walking through the quadrangle going from class to class. The collegiate days were supposed to be the happiest. They weren’t. He had a lot of deep emotional problems and he didn’t know quite how to deal with them. He lost his beauteous raven-haired girlfriend. Now he hopped around and squeezed the sweaters of certain sorority girls. He hung around with Lady-killers like his frat brother Atkinson. He hadn’t been initiated yet; his grades were so low he had to pledge again this last semester. He was lost and didn’t feel too privileged about it. Well, it would be soon off to another construction sight or refin-ery, where he would swell over with happiness. He hated college and the autonomy of professors. In a word, he was at once enthralled by the rite of passage of leaving high school behind, and attending college.
He seemed to excel in whatever he didn’t need to further his chances of making a living. He guessed that he could get an English degree or Music degree and a twenty thousand dollar job would be handed to him. But reality set in like the fog banks on the Mississippi levee before the sun dis-persed theme like phantom swamp gas.
He had some wild times in college. As far as girls were concerned. He was stupid enough to break up with his steady girlfriend through the remainder of his years at Catholic High. He was on the downward path and he had a way to go. There was an endless procession of keg parties and mixers with the sororities who graced the frat houses with gaiety for a few hours of slurred speech and beer slipping games. The house always reeked rank with a film of sticky beer only to be housed down like the hovel it was; that’s why the drain plugs were there. The sorority houses lined a picaresque road and College Lake was immaculate. They would always descend to the hellishness of Izod shirts and topsiders and clean-cut boys on the brink of Manhood. Most had a gainful knowledge that they were heading towards the business world. Ricky was the unassuming sensitive youth. His eyes were still gaping from the trickling of liberal doses of knowledge and mind-blowing perpendicular doctrines. He was attracted to those Science Fiction courses and lured to purchase esoteric books. To wander to the music build-ing only to be snubbed by them. He was alone in his narrow world of eclectic ruin, from which he could not exit.
So he bounced from frat house to pothead apartments in Tigerland to classes. He had been seen and smelt with alcohol on his breath in circuits and semiconductor classes, much unlike the serious, technically oriented clientele then. This university was taking on another more unclassifiable form; his problems melted like phantasies when he took to drink. He was a philistine in Whiteface. A hybrid of sensitive studious application from the most elite prep school to a wastrel with below average grades. His parents in the manicured suburbs had done all they could; the rest was up to him. Nobody cared who was present when those mandatory rolls were called in Calculus, Chemistry lab. He couldn’t handle this careening around like a child’s top, wobbling aimlessly around.
He had needed to get through finals and also from his dope smok-ing frat brothers; that phalanx of righteous beer guzzling ne’er-do-wells. Get his mind back squarely upon his shoulders. Get that sensitive counte-nance and flaxen hair back in to a bronzed facsimile of a broiled-in-the toiling-sun quality. So befitting girls favor accorded him. This was all a legendary tale told with bright intensity. The infamies that were commit-ted. Endless social pathos and girl chasing. Men-boys rambling around with a collegiate look about them: the topsiders, Izod shirts and a beer can grafted to the left hand. Where the term "dropping trow" would become the mainstay and touchstone of the small bygone era. The students bisected by gender were too much for Ricky Harrison, wide-eyed sensitive youth. He didn’t have courage to talk to girls at the White Horse Tavern on Fridays, when the frat boys would literally start drinking at 12 noon and be sloshed veritably well by five in the afternoon. He had a persistent wail quietly flitting about in his thoughts; unsatisfactory family life, brother still quite screwed up.
The family outward seemed fine; inward, rotting malignantly. A household who read Vonnegut, full of ascetic Catholics whose attendance did not mostly include the Harrison household.
The corduroy, Earth tones, long hair and waste-oids paraded in these bars of iniquity, these watering holes. It was their prerogative, their civil duty to get levelly faced at all mixers. To dog and snake as many women as possible. To lie to them, get in the sack with them, then dump them like a sack of coal abruptly and move on. A frat rat’s work was never done. The boys were giving it their all.
Nietzsche and the hellishness of Pireaus and Plato’s Republic. Where did he fit in? In this vast amalgam of pretty coeds and rakish handsome upstarts with an obnoxiousness and arrogance befitting their generation. So he was on an eternal quest of how many refineries could he work at until he would be truly lost in the milling of the Everyman? Mislaid at fraternity outings, the cry could be heard in a rebel yell: "Where the hell is Harrison?"
and then soon quite forgotten. It wouldn’t be long before he went off to the tank farms and refineries; probably Exxon this time. That refinery was what made Baton Rouge.
Just yesterday in the fraternity house, where the sunlight of the midmorning pierced the high tinted windows, the television blared out the noon news: A pompadour-gargoyle bleated out something that rang in Ricky’s ears:
"Four different Chlorine spills occurred at Dow Chemical Plant in Plaquemine today, this morning. The OSHA representatives are considering filing a lawsuit in the name of the state environmental agency, spokesman Paul Grandit says.
"And at another plant construction is still stopped by the litigation of officials from the environmental protection agency and the construction compa-nies bided to do jobs this is at the new Nuclear Power plant near St. Francisville. Spokesmen for the Nuclear Plant say it will still open before the year is out." Ricky had nodded and went back to his studies of rhetorical dia-grams and symbols for which he hadn’t the faintest notion the meaning therein. There was various stimulating short-jerked conversation between the aesthetes and the skankmongers concerning whether or not Tim Bergeron got any last night from that Byronic vision of a coed from A O Pi Sorority.
"I talked to him, he said he got it, he screwed her."
They laughed.
"That lucky son of a bitch; that girl was so fine. I would suck her daddy’s dong for the chance at that."
More cherubic clarion of laughter pealed out.
The campus free bus full of sorority women and fraternity rats always stopped right in front. They carted these aesthetes to their various destinations for the retched finals. The "Day of the Dead" for studying now long gone and the semester almost over. Ricky always waited his turn, scan-ning the bus for various perfumed and powdered female, but not too osten-tatiously— rather conspicuously. The ride was not ever invigorating.
He had taken his final with abysmal reserves; he was the second person to leave, amidst the Asian refuges, the Korean wonders, the Chinese yellow peril. The calculus-ridden breeds and the others would suffer the fate of some brilliant genius blowing the curve all to hell. Ricky loved the celebrations accorded the reversing of migraine-inducing finals. The subse-quent death of the semester. Of life, soon the campus would be devoid of all of them, just the eternally hibernating foreigners who had no particular place to go and certainly couldn’t afford a ticket to the side of the world they lived on, never rotating back to their worlds.
He knew that soon he would be out with acrid skies above him, the large ironclad tanks on the horizon. He would be kowtowing to black foremen telling him to police the area. Not bums of calculus teachers and twanged-accented types telling him how many volts go across a capacitor. There was a whole world out there beyond the miasmic hub of refineries looming onto the winding muddy Mississippi River.
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