Part One: I Never Understood Why That Happened,
But Everybody Else did, or knew Better.
This story is in honor of Mel Brooks, Jewish-American film director and crazy lover of the Raisinette, a chocolate-covered candy, and Anne Bancroft. Maybe he is racist “swine,” maybe he was not. I think he was secretly on my side the entire time. Well, Hitler told me HE was secretly on my…thus, this particular Tale of Woe. What if the entire world was run by string musicians? Then, we’d have the Beatles.
Jeannie Krantz lived alone. She never dreamed she could feel so free and so lonely at one and the same time.
At $350 per month she rented the cheapest, cheesiest one-bedroom she could find in all of Los Angeles’ outskirts.
It had only half a toilet, which frequently overflowed.
There were many such apartments, LaLaland being but one such flow’ry beskirted city arena, ridden with beaches, thoroughfares and restaurants, thriving with businesses, Mexicans, Blacks, whoever and tourists seeking to swim in the La Brea Tar Pits, or trying out at the nonexistent Hollywood studios, happily munching on perfect corn tortillas, moving fast and early to procure good seats on January 1st for the Rose Bowl Parade. Always a good, clear day, that…
Dancing and theater couldn't be better, and Jeannie simply lived for them both. Anything else hurt too much.
She was eighteen, short, black-haired and white-skinned, a contrast she usually hoped most people would find appealing. But just to go along with modern times as they seemed to be, she exhibited the usual dark-hued death fixations, this being the era of AIDS, cancer, and oats-bloated Africans, dressing aptly for street occasions-- black, black, and black on black. Sometimes she wore a touch of red or blue for color, but black was IT.
She was very pretty, and rendering herself almost totally unavailable. Not a virgin, she had two abortions. For a brief while—three years-- she also had quite a coke hang-up.
Over the past year she found she didn't care to hang out with men anymore, not even in the theatre crowd should love, having built more stages, brewed more coffee, written more scripts and done more auditions than any eighteen-year-old high school dropout she knew. She finally entered the women's community.
It got here away from sexism, letting her hang out with the crowd of lesbians, easy-going heterosexual ladies and older women who were beginning to rethink the whole post-abortion scene.
She liked it, but never could get closer to anybody there.
Jeannie just wasn't the lesbian type. Couldn't dress sloppy or like a man, couldn't fake love, even after trying on two separate occasions. She was always the darker one, and both girls have expected her to do all of the love-making. No thanks!
One Wednesday, she was humming to herself, a snatch of “Runnin’ ‘Round the Outside,” a song written by an ancient Eastern God known only as Brooklyn, and which goes like this:
“Runnin’ ‘round the outside, upon the outside,
Rollin’, your liberty upholds, uphold, uphoo-old…
Runnin’ round the outside, upon the outside,
Rollin’, the West upholds, upholds, UPHOLDS…
Runnin’ ‘round the outside, rollin’ on the Left,
Deedle, deedle, deedle do, upon the Left. Tink, tink!
Upon the Left. Tink, TINK...Runnin’ ‘round the outside…”
She sang as she arranged her latest indoor toy, a Wiccan alter, to her satisfaction. It was pretty, quaint, and futile.
This was a new hobby for her. Something to horse around with. There were many Wiccan cults in L.A., run by a variety of intriguing ladies and interesting men, all of them seemingly harmless and usually devoted to the concept of the Goddess. But Jeannie had found one recently with a different cast to it.
It was run entirely by people with shaved heads. They looked like either Buddhists or Neo-Nazis, it being hard to see which direction they were going, but she could tell they were friendly.
“We don’t need any straight hang-ups here, we’re not rad, that’s too straight. We like simple, elegant growth, just hanging out on the spiritual side and seeing what we can do to make our lives more…pure.” That crowd was into natural foods, very light herbal drugs (really just incense), and prayers to the Goddess AND the God, if you preferred the masculine approach.
Jeannie thought she liked the people involved, but eventually she found them rather stand-offish, and little bit too…pure.
After a while, she had collected enough Wiccan artifacts to open up practically a small church in her tiny apartment. She owned: sixteen varieties of incense; intricately sewn pillows containing human hair; dried sea creatures, pine needles and powdered crystals, dozens of them in multiple colors scattered around; she laid beautiful tapestry Oriental rugs down, one possibly two centuries old; a hammock full of twisted rattan dolls made in the image of “friendship attractors,” meant to pull good people to her; piles of seashells and broken rock crystal formations, geodes; and six foot-high statues, one made of solid jade, all of various Oriental and early Indo-European major deities. She tried worshipping them once, to see what would happen, but of course nothing did. Except she saw the sunlight outside her dusty, caked-over, cracked window increase.
Later that same day, she found herself following an idea she'd read in a book. Books were a useful, silent companion that never got her pregnant, never skipped out on rent, never bitched.
Perpetually lonely, not wanting to search for a Houston, having too many frightening encounters with me and lately, she was spending more and more time rearranging her apartment. She had a good waitressing job that satisfied her, but there was no movement upwards. Sooner or later she'd have to push on. Maybe she'd get a job as a secretary. They make good money. Or take classes at a local community college. She liked food service.
There is not a lot of ambition being handed out on the street anymore, she finally decided, burning some sandalwood incense while reading the weird old hardback she’d purchased from the new Wiccan bookstore just down the ratty old street she lived on.
It was a very old tome, one with torn brown tattered covers, the glue peeling, the pages ripped. Well over fifty years old.
Something looked strange and familiar about the language. Must be in Spanish and English, she decided; she could just barely make it out. But she didn't read…any…Spanish.
The book was called the Necronomicon, was written by some Arab guy, “the Mad Arab Abdul” …something or other. There was a major water stain on the title page, obscuring the last name.
It all looked pretty shaky. It claimed to be a magic book. They all did, from that bookstore. ‘Sposed ta cure what ails ya.
Jeannie knew that getting any real magic from an old book was hopeless, but she had to admire the studied care and attention the author put into his work. It read like a textbook on evil.
She soon came across a part where the Mad Eric seemed to get a little bit over-excited. He was very wordy and quite overtly “pretentious”—a fave word of Jeannie’s. He scarcely held the reader's interest, going on and on about “hideous necromantic spells more blasphemous than man could ever know,” stuff that lost her because it kept putting things beyond the reader’s reach.
What good is a book that only tells you it's too hard to deal with it? The damn work could use some pictures and conversation!
Finally, one part struck her fancy, it reading as follows:
“But after this book, there will come a book so evil and blasphemous that it's unspeakable rantings will cause the deaths of millions and millions of untold people…” Waitaminute.