Stellar Visitors Everywhere

In Hell on Earth, I write about a lot of events that seem to be tied together even when they occurred many years or often decades apart. Maybe that’s just the writer in me trying to tie things together.

One such event was the publication of my first free-lanced article in the LA Times entitled Tall Tales about a Stellar Visitor. There was just a short mention of the article in the book but there was much more to Tall Tales about a Stellar Visitor that made the event important enough to include in the novel.

The story starts on a quiet night in San Pedro when Cecil and I are sitting in a bar discussing the world and how we could fix it if someone gave us a chance. A man sitting next to us, possibly recognizing our unutilized potential announced to us that he was from Alpha Centauri and that he was down here observing. We spent the next several hours quizzing him to see if he was legit. I believe at one point we put a lighted match inside the heel of his shoe to see if he could feel pain. We also played a little pool with him to see if he had any superhuman skills. We also allowed him to buy numerous rounds to possibly determine just how big of an expense account someone traveling from another star might have to play around with. What we learned was that yes he could feel pain and no he didn’t have any special skills and yes aliens did travel quite comfortably. In the end we couldn’t reach any conclusion as to whether he was telling the truth and eventually returned home and forgot about the alien.

A few months later I picked up the LA Times to find an article about 22 Oregonians who had sold all their possessions and vanished in preparation for a rapture event they believed to be right around the corner, where most rapture events seem to be waiting. These faithful were led by the Bonnie and Clyde of the rapture movement, Marshall Applewhite, who called himself Bo and Bonnie Nettles, who went by the nom de plume Peep. Get it? The obvious question with these kind of stories is how much of it can or should we believe. In my article I related the story about the man in San Pedro from Alpha Centauri, if in fact he really was from Alpha Centauri and if in fact we really were in San Pedro. Again that should have been the end of it but just as some wells never go dry some stories never die.

Twenty years later, living in Virginia Beach, I picked up the paper again to read that 39 members of a cult group, “Heaven’s Gate,” had successfully committed suicide to coincide with the passing of the comet Hale-Bopp overhead, which apparently was their ride out of here. No word on whether the rapture was successful but get this, “Heaven’s Gate” was led by the dynamic duo Bo and Peep.

Put all these things together—the man claiming to be from Alpha Centauri, the Oregonians following Bo and Peep to nowhere, my article debunking the hysteria surrounding these missing Oregonians based on my actual meeting with an alien in a bar, and then the re-appearance of Bo and Peep in yet another trip to nowhere and I decided the episode earned at least a mention in a novel involving more than a little unexplained coming and going and at least a few stellar visitors.

Fact or Fiction

What came first, the chicken or the egg?
What came first, the fiction or the fact? Or are they the same?

I wrote the fictional story, Hell on Earth, a love story that bears more than a little semblance to my own life. The main character in my story, a likable guy named Hank, who is, in fictional life, me, is writing a story about his life—much like I am doing. What a coincidence.

So, there you have it. One facet of my life is writing a story about it, which is the reason why one facet of Hank’s life in Hell on Earth is writing a story about his life. But there is a problem.

I think what I am writing is a fictionalized account of a real event.
So does Hank, since he is, in fact, the fictional me. But he doesn’t have a clue.
In my story, I have him being manipulated by outside forces, ones that he is unaware of, forces that lead him to write Hell on Earth, the novel, coincidently, that I wrote.

So a better question might be, “Who’s in charge?
The fictional answer is obviously, “The Erebians.”
The Factual answer: “Beats me.”

Angelina, the waitress at the pizzeria

The name of the sinner banished to Hell was going to be Rasmoth from the beginning. I don’t know why but like all names, after awhile it grew on me.

Hank Johnson, didn’t exist until I wrote Postal Service but once the writing of Postal Service became an integral part of the Hell on Earth story, I had to make Hank Johnson the earthly reincarnation of Rasmoth.

Angelina was a different story. She went through more name changes than Prince Rogers Nelson.

Sometime between when I first got the idea for Hell on Earth back in 1974 and when I finished it in 2011 I bought a couple of Louis Prima albums at a garage sale. I liked his sound but that would have been the end of it except that somewhere along the line Mazda also discovered “The Lip,” then “Jump, Jive an Wail” was back on the radio and suddenly there was a whole new world of Louis Prima enthusiasts. I found myself buying some CD’s to replace the scratchy albums I had stored away.

For a long time I had Rasmoth going to a diner after completing the story that led to his banishment to Hell but decided instead to offer a little tribute to Louis Prima by having him visit Angelina, the waitress at the pizzeria.

Flying Silos

I was in the last days of my army enlistment and because I had told my CO that I wanted to write for a newspaper, I was in the early days of my two-month internship with the San Pedro News-Pilot.

As the story in Hell on Earth relates, it was really a judge at the gates of heaven that wanted me to be a newspaper writer, but who knew. I was doing my best to impress my editor but the truth is I was doing very light feature stories and probably wasn’t going to make a name for myself in the short time allotted.

And then one day something happened. It may have been due to interference from some outside force or it may have just been dumb luck. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between the two. But I stepped outside my apartment on the upper end of 20th Street in San Pedro, looked down at Los Angeles Harbor, and saw a raging fire and columns of smoke coming from the silos that lined the docks.

I returned to my apartment, grabbed my camera and began taking pictures. It could have easily resulted in just a lot of pictures of smoke, just as in Vietnam I took a lot of pictures of treetops; but this time I got lucky.

As I snapped away, I saw through my lens one of the silos explode and go airborne and suddenly, in an instant, I didn’t just have a picture of a fire but now I had an awesome picture of a fire and a silo looking like it had just been launched from Cape Canaveral —one that was easily newsworthy.

I brought it to my editor and they published it, which would have been good enough but then something better happened. The next day he told me that the picture had gone out over the wires and other papers, I seem to remember the Cleveland Daily Plain being one of them, had picked it up.

Why a Pornography Writer

I knew when I started my novel Hell on Earth that becoming a newspaper writer was going to be Rasmoth’s punishment but I didn’t know what sin would send him to Hell (Earth).

I was going back to Rochester in 1975 for Christmas break with two ex-CSULB students. We were three complete strangers whose only involvement with each other was driving a non-stop, cross-country marathon from about 4:30 Friday afternoon when they picked me up after my last class until 6:00 Sunday evening when we arrived in Bristol, Virginia. You can learn a lot about someone in a 50-hour car ride. Most of it you forget because you never see them again but some of it sticks.

The girl, whose car we would be riding in, was quitting school and returning home to Connecticut. She was having some problems with her fiancé or was hoping to become engaged or wanted to break the engagement off. It was something like that and I only remember that she wasn’t very happy about going home.

The guy, on the other hand, was very relaxed. He had graduated the previous year with a teaching credential much like the one I was working toward and was teaching composition at a local junior college. He also had another job that provided him with a little bit of extra spending money.

He wrote pornography inspired by pictures a publisher would give him. He told me that when he finished a story he would shuffle the pictures and come up with another different story.

The thought of a composition instruction writing pornography on the side had never crossed my mind, and he could have even been making it all up, but once I knew that the job existed, or that at least one person was doing it, I knew that I had found my condemnation-to-Hell sin for Rasmoth.