LETTER TO ANGELA
by Zack Kopp
Dear Angela,
SO it looks like you found a new job, that’s good news after that guy you nursed back to health from cancer dumped you and kicked you out. Is that what happened? That’s how it looked on Facebook. Sure was nice of you, nursing him back to life like that, and how ungrateful of him, dumping you. Did we meet on a dating site? OK Cupid or something? I think that’s what it was. The first time we hung out we went to this bar you knew about off Broadway right where that hill comes up on the east side at 16th. We were drinking in there and I remember telling you the reason I wear so much gray all the time is because of a childhood identification with a character called the Gray Mouser. I think you’re the only other person I’ve ever told that. We left the bar, it was raining, we were inside the glass bus stop shelter outside the post office building and I asked if I could kiss you. “Yeah, let’s try,” you said and I gave you a gentle soft kiss but I guess I should have gone in more according to your tastes—the thing is, I’d just been rebuffed by someone else for kissing too passionately, so it was bad timing. I wish I’d given you more tongue or something, but luckily, we were able to establish a rapport without. I remember you invited me over to your place in Five Points one time and one of your younger boyfriends was lolling around in the living room watching TV while we shared a bottle of wine in the backyard talking about how we both channeled writing and art from the ether without hardly trying and how that made us something else entirely. I’ve always liked your style, the way you changed your name to “Black” after you got a divorce to black out your whole past and kept forging ahead in your self-determined sex tourism and service career as a wise-cracking waitress and bartender working for Elon Musk’s brother and God knows what other hell raisers and fat cats. So I’m writing a couple of books make that three counting the stories collection which is also a satire of advertising mind and devising a couple of films one of which I’ll cut together from podcasts I’ve done once I find a good video editor. Things are looking up despite Big Arch’s machinations. That’s what I call him, named after the new Big Mac. I went to San Francisco about a year ago to see my godfather, Rodger C. Birt and catch up with Jami Cassady. Rodger was my dad’s best friend when they were both teaching at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon in the late sixties. Jami, Beat Hero Neal Cassady’s daughter, had been a friend since shortly after I’d published a book called The Denver Beat Scene in 2015 after being recommended for the task by Heather Dalton, director of Neal Cassady: The Denver Years, who also played in a few Denver bands and inspired me to Denver punk culture a long time ago. The trip was great. I got a whole new vision of my dad’s friendship with Rodger as fellow teachers and intellectual seekers in the time of psychedelics and worldwide culture and generational clashes. Jami passed away in January and I spoke with her husband Randy Ratto a few days ago who says I can still be the one to help market all unpublished Cassady materials, so I’m looking around. Meanwhile I’ve got a book all done compiling all my beat-related writings that didn’t make it into the Denver Beat Scene, currently in negotiations with one likely publisher about that (who knows, but it’s looking good) and another one compiling all the articles I’ve written on Jim Morrison faking his death, and how and why, and all prospective evidence and outcomes. I think you know I worked as a publicist for Jim’s ex-brother-in-law Alan Graham for 20 + years. That guy was from Liverpool, grew up with all the Beatles, and worked as a fixer for Larry Flynt when he was running for president from inside the nut ward in 1983. I probably told you about that, maybe not. The latest chapter is that there’s a guy named Frank Wagner in upstate New York who is most likely Jim but he still plays a game of not being him, so it’s like a surreal benevolent standoff between driven director Jeff Finn (look for Before The End: Searching for Jim Morrison) and the aforementioned Wagner-Morrison, which is very compelling and endearing to view in a postmodern light of how affected by fame everything gets around here and what’s real after all, but as you know I like that sort of thing. According to Finn, Frank is “giving him the slow reveal” and it is strange how this whole film has been made about him (Frank) being Morrison and he doesn’t object. That one’s called Strange Tales of Jim Morrison and I’m looking around for a publisher for it if anyone comes to mind. So you’re not in Vegas anymore, I assume, but it sounds like you found a new house and a new job slinging drinks in another bar, good for you. Right now I’m co-hosting some social medicine events at Mutiny Info Café, giving speeches monthly on things like Identity, God as a state not a being, Staying in Your Own Movie where you’re the director and star, and that sort of thing, which is a whole different trip for me, as compared to trying to make the same points implicitly as a spoken word type. Make that four books; I just sent three sample chapters of transcripts of these speeches to another publisher, and another manuscript is taking form called Punk Metaphysics. Those events are turning into open mics and I’ll start bringing my guitar out. The world’s gone crazy, and crazier still, but these events and all the writing I’ve been doing have been extremely satisfying despite/because of that, and all the stuff happening now that once seemed so inconceivable will be supplanted soon enough by something else that now seems impossible, and I’m taking the long view. It fluctuates, but right now I feel good, and I hope you do too. I just looked it up, you’re in Oregon now, and it looks like all your chihuahuas are doing well, though I think one may have died, and my respects to her. Maybe I’ll come pay you a visit sometime. I’ve been looking around for another country or state or unknown part of the city to run away to ever since Big Arch got crowned but I’ve decided to stay here in Denver at least one more year. It’s a city I know my way around better than any other I’ve been to so far, which might be a huge benefit in these otherwise uncertain territories we’ve all entered as a nation and world and species (considering all the UAP/FO conspiracies you ever heard of turn out to be true, plus that whole thing about the sex trafficking cannibal island). Everything feels so strange now, since Big Arch started to release all the alien files, like we’ve opened a whole new level. The dumps happen every two weeks and the news gets stranger each time. UTube is flooded with videos asking questions like “What are the aliens Really?” or “What are we to Them?” One popular theory is that it’s a symbiotic relationship where they feed off our emotional highs and lows and somehow we sustain them. Think of it: for all you know, every weird habit you ever had was paying off unseen aliens in emotional fuel. I have a theory that somehow the aliens are sustaining us too in some important way. But what if all goes back to a deal they made with our government to use the media to keep us in a sustained state of worry and fear just to pay off their end of the deal by feeding all the aliens a steady line of “loosh”? That’s probably it, or something like that. That sure would explain a lot. All the wars, all the crime, the racism, the gang wars, the crack, the AIDS, the Covid, fentanyl, unwanted pregnancies, anything, you name it. I remember on one of our dates you told me you worked for the Salvation Army and even they promoted all the worst emotions in their headlines as if following a playbook. That sure is a fucked up program we’ve been getting used to all these years. But according to science, reality is a reflection of our minds, so if we can learn to stay in the superposition long enough before we make a move, we’ll probably be all right. I’ve been seeing this one-eyed girl named Dynamita now and then and we’re going to a haunted hotel in the mountains run by enterprising Satanists at the end of this month to see a band called White Satan play and have a haunted night of passion in the Nikola Tesla room tripping on mushrooms. If that doesn’t sound like the right way to ring in the next level of experience, I don’t know what does. I should say possible Satanists because who knows. When I first heard the band was called White Satan I thought it was gonna be some kind of racist thing but it’s just the guy’s last name, Arlo White, and he’s doing something Handsome Family-esque, (the Sparks couple call their sound “Southern Gothic” which I like) and White Satan does a cover of “Wichita Lineman” by Glen Campbell (who was a sideman for the Beach Boys, among other things, but mostly known for country). I had a phase of Glen Campbell fandom as a little kid. I remember there was a song called “Back in the Race” I used to cheer myself up after all the other kids ostracized me for reasons I still don’t understand, which has given me a lifelong crisis to bear, though it gets better all the time. But enough about me. I hope you and your dogs will be all right. Stay alive and I’ll talk to you soon.
Until we meet again,
Zack
Zack Kopp is co-creator of the monthly Coffeehouse for Social Medicine at Mutiny Information Café in Denver. All his books are available at Amazon. Find more of his writing (fact and fiction) at www.campelasticity.com
