Planet Fever (5 page)

Both the dog and he grinned during their entire approach.

He sat down next to me and exhaled a huge, content sigh. Clearing his throat, he turned to face me. “Froward Moroni’s the name: General and friend of the legion of insane, inane, disdained, unclaimed, un-reigned, untamed, deranged, rearranged, out-of-range, mundane, profane, lame, and not to forget: humane. This here is my second in command, best friend to woman and man, and always willing to make a stand for the good-guy’s band: Mackie—the Lonesome Bulldog!

Moroni gave an exaggerated ovation as the dog looked about and wagged its backside. The dog’s tongue dangled, showering the sidewalk with slobber.

MORONI INVITED
me to join him for “The Greatest Cause Humanity, and at least two-thirds of the Milky Way Galaxy, Will Have Ever Known!” He didn’t endeavor into the particulars of that “Cause” at the time, but he did promise “food and entertainment a-plenty; conversation, camaraderie without a … bounty.” He then cursed himself for not finding a better word than “bounty” to fulfill his rhyming scheme.

I followed him to where his motorcycle—with sidecar—was parked. Mackie hopped up into the sidecar. Moroni mounted the cycle and I climbed on behind him. He tossed his top hat in with the dog then fired up the bike.

Off we went.

About 20 minutes later, we pulled into a shanty-camp situated in some isolated hills in the vast wilderness area of Los Angeles’ Griffith Park. Other characters meandered about the camp, cooking, singing, painting, boozing, snoozing, and cavorting. We climbed off the vehicle, Moroni re-donned his hat, and then began introducing me to various members of his clan.

A couple of guys sat at a picnic table playing chess. “This here is Fred Fillono: the finest cinematic artist ever … greater than he there have never been, are, nor will be—never.”

Fillono tipped his brimmed hat in salutation.

Moroni continued. “Ah—and here in our camp we have Marcel the Champ: painter and sculptor for fun … grandmaster of chess who will reign victorious over and then humbly give his thanks to just about anyone….”

The Champ stood up, performed an exaggerated bow and shook my hand.

Moroni pointed at me. “Yes, sure—and you, my good sir, please do not be shy … give us your moniker and what you do, by-the-by….”

Loose shards of memory were attempting to surface in my head. “My name … is Bikaver. I think I’m a writer….”

“Bravo! Just what we need: a scribe, Reality Author, court recorder ye shall be … well, then this shall fit the bill—ahh yes—here is your hallowed pencil.” He brandished a pencil from his coat pocket and handed it to me. On the side were inscribed the letters “F-T-W-C.” He gave me an extravagant wink.

I gave him my thanks.

I WILLINGLY
joined this band of transients and ingratiated myself as Moroni had invited. While we were a bevy of transients, we invited various other vagrants who happened to be endowed with any form of creative nature into our little raggedy troupe.

Moroni manned the helm of the ship as its captain and spokesperson—its “top dog.”

Many spiels on the virtues of free thought issued forth from the man: free thinkers—being painters, musicians, philosophers, writers, poets, playwrights, mimes, performance artists, and stunt-men (Moroni’s own words)—were in fact civilization’s only hope for survival. “For it is they….” he would exclaim, “who are least likely to be brainwashed by the corporate-mass-media-manipulation melee…! We are, indeed, on the brink;
I am
because I think, if I have nary my own thought—then I am naught.”

His “fire-sideways chats” every Saturday night were delivered with the fervor of a fire-and-brimstone preacher or the classic military dictator’s zeal. His dictums covered everything from unknown enemies, varying means of mind-control, false realities, and the systematic duping, doping and dumbing-down of the human race to the fact that our kitchen sinks were spying on us.

We listened respectfully, but didn’t take seriously his wild pronouncements.

He was our ringleader, in charge of the entertainment and festivities. For us, his vast and incessant paranoia—which fueled his fine rants—was
part of the show.
We detected neither menace nor danger from the man, quite the contrary: upon his initiative and leadership, a viable forum for transient artists to share with one another time, camaraderie, companionship and entertainment had been achieved. We had become a tribe, a family, a roving band of misfit artists. And we would present our works regularly.

Upon the seventeenth of every other month, Fillono projected one of his films via a hand-cranked projector. A common theme that ran throughout his oeuvre of work was that of mind-manipulation via higher powers upon an unknowing protagonist or group of protagonists. Every single one of his movies contained a character called “The Telepathic Ventriloquist,” played by the dashing and youthful actor Lethan O’Leery, whose outright cynicism was eclipsed only by his love of whiskey, which was far eclipsed by his handsome young Paul Newman looks. Why hadn’t Lethan O’Leery gone “mainstream” and become a big screen “heartthrob?” His theory (in his genteel North Carolina accent): “Because I ain’t nobbed the gatekeeper. And I ain’t ever gonna.”

Each eve of Mercury’s “retrograde” cycle, Marcel “The Champ” unveiled a new painting or sculpture. Why Mercury’s retrograde cycle? “Because it happens about three or four times a year, and not always at the same time. So it is fixed, but not
too
fixed. That way I have a schedule, but not too tight.”

Did he subscribe to the “astrological” nuances of the cycles? “Eh, I don’t know about all that. Maybe things go haywire, maybe not. The universe is a very large place, maybe the biggest, and perhaps a butterfly flapping its wings in Havana can eventually cause a supernova in the Andromeda galaxy. Who knows? Not me.”

His most notorious painting, “Naked Business Woman Descending Upon an Escalator,” raised quite a few eyebrows, particularly because it looked like a time-lapsed film of a naked woman on an escalator, but all the frames of the film were superimposed atop one another, so you couldn’t really tell what it was. But if you looked closely (perhaps like those pictures where if you stare at it just the right way you might see something) you could see that the woman was in fact flipping off Gill Bates, the billionaire behind the Macrohard software behemoth.

His most controversial sculpture—a tipped-over, portable outhouse with “American Standard (Capsized)” spray painted in gold color on the door—garnered kudos from the underground “low-brow” art crowd, while causing the pompous New York art “establishment” to hold their noses, most likely because he had used a quite uncleaned outhouse for the show.

When not painting or sculpting, he would be found schooling someone in a round of chess and saying, “thank you very much for a pleasant game” after check mate.

Chuck the “Born Again Poet” recited his eclectic rants and guttural takes on reality, the universe, God, freedom, booze, drugs, women, cash, technology, and dog racing; many times decipherable only between his rusty and roaring fits of cigarette induced coughing and powerful and violent bouts of 99-cent-store-wine-provoked projectile vomiting.

The sultry and bosom-heavy Lustra Love-Joy caused uncontrollable “libido-sensitive epileptic seizures” in all of the male and some of the female portion of the audience upon each showing of her ever-evolving, quite suggestive and hyper-erotic performance art she entitled “the OM”(Orgasmic Movements).

This is the way it went for about a year. None of us considered for a moment the highly intelligent Moroni to be dangerous. His speeches had an entrancing manner; the impassioned yet inane dictums mesmerized the group as though a mass hypnosis were occurring. I began to take notice that all of us would inject Moroni’s pronouncements thematically into each of our respective works—as though he were the storm cloud and our artworks the raindrops manifested therefrom.

“I am the planet of ideas, and you are all my satellites.”

“The world is in a state of fever. I am the doctor and you are all my orderlies.”

“People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs. I am the top dog. Fight for a few underdogs anyway.”

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page. You all are my pages.”

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing you.”

“I alone cannot change the world, but I can cannonball into the pool and cause many ripples. You all are my ripples.”

He encouraged us to go out and sell, display, perform and present our respective forms of art, “because, you see—not even thoughts, anymore, are free.” Our transient troupe trekked to various towns and cities around the region—a traveling low-brow hobo show—presenting, performing, displaying and selling to anyone who had the time and wherewithal to oblige us…. It was a pretty decent set up.

I FILLED
up a number of notebooks with material during my twelve-month stint with the “troupe.” In my mind, Moroni was a man whose imagination dwarfed his rationale, but an inspirational force to “we the wretchedly refused.” He motivated us to be more than just bums, which is what we were.

The man had passion.
His fervor insinuated itself in us.

We called ourselves “Free Thought and Will
Champions.
” We had turned into a viable band, surviving off the hospitality and donations from philanthropic hosts and selling to those who had an appreciation for “the lowest of the low arts”—as Moroni mused.

My job as a reporter or recorder: to pen exposés chronicling the goings-on of our group, and record virtually everything Moroni had said.

And write stories.

I sold one fictional story (Fillono and I co-wrote) to an underground literary magazine. We both worked on the screenplay; he turned the screenplay into a film and I into a short story.

The gist of the yarn: The Telepathic Ventriloquist sits up on the stage with his dummy and stares at the audience in stark silence.

Neither he nor the dummy ever move their mouths: through telepathy he prompts his audience into laughter.

The ventriloquist’s act gains more and more notoriety.