Category Archives: The ArtIC Circle

2025-12-07 Two seconds’ work

by

0

I’m so happy. I was feeling a little blue tonight, wondering what’s real and what isn’t. I typed in one prompt and got this amazing piece, a new dimension to my life. God bless Chat GPT.

The Sickie Souse Club: “An Elegy for After”

The party had decayed into something finer, like a cut flower that smells sweetest just before it browns. Graylyn’s studio—fourth floor of the old Schmidt Building on Kinzie—still pulsed with the fading echo of the Ramones: “I wanna be sedated,” some final, pleading voice bouncing off steel beams and cold cement. The stereo had been left on inside, someone had sat on the remote hours ago, and now Joey’s voice came and went like a dying ghost in a warehouse of neon and shadow.

Out on the back stairs, where the cigarettes were, and the real confessions, the night air was brutal and blue, Chicago December deep into its cruelty. Angela’s breath came in thick little clouds as she pulled the collar of her bomber jacket higher, the cigarette trembling between two fingers.

“Graylyn!” she shouted into the stairwell, “this weather’s committing crimes!”

Graylyn stood a few steps above her, legs bare beneath her father’s old greatcoat, clutching a wine glass full of gin and blue Gatorade. It fluoresced like plutonium. Her laughter was a crack in the night, sharp and unsympathetic.

“You chose to come out here, angel,” she said, her voice a mix of bourbon and ballet lessons. “I told you. The party’s inside.”

“But your stairs are poetry,” Alvin whispered, sitting near the bottom, sketchbook open on his knees. He was drawing the shadows. Not the stairs themselves—never the stairs—but the shadows of the railing as they fell like prison bars on the peeling concrete.

Drake leaned against the wall just inside the door, one foot still in the heat and light of the studio, one foot out in the frostbite, a purgatory position. His coat hung open, his shirt unbuttoned like a poet in mourning, and he was talking—half to himself, half to whoever would orbit close enough to hear.

“There’s something about decay,” he said. “Like, real beauty starts after the structure collapses. Like, no one falls in love with the wedding cake—they fall in love with the crumbs on the hotel pillow the next morning.”

“You’re drunk,” Trish said, but softly, like she was afraid the night would hear her. She had come out barefoot, her heels dangling from one hand like a threatened weapon. Her hair was tangled, and her cheeks flushed from the vodka and the dancing and something else—some kind of certainty that this night, like the city itself, would never forgive them.

Dustin emerged behind her, brushing her shoulder with his as he passed. He lit a clove and blew smoke out hard, his gaze fixed on the skyline cut sharp against the heavens.

“I keep thinking,” he said, “about how the stars are the same ones above Baghdad and Reykjavík and Joliet, and it doesn’t matter at all, does it?”

“Only if you’re alone,” Alvin murmured.

“I feel alone,” Charles announced, suddenly appearing from the fire door, a bag of ice over one eye and a heroic grin on his face. “I just got punched by a guy in a denim vest who thought I was coming on to his girlfriend.”

“You were,” Angela said.

“Of course,” Charles said. “But that’s hardly the point.”

There was a silence, broken only by the echoing loop of the Ramones, now distant and more haunting than it had any right to be. The city beyond them was blue and brutal, yes—but also endless. Somewhere down the alley, a dog barked. Somewhere below, a car backfired. Somewhere inside, someone coughed and laughed at once.

Graylyn held her glass up to the fluorescent light that flickered above them, watching the strange liquid slosh and shimmer.

“Do you think we’ll remember this?” she asked. “Like, actually remember it? The texture of this exact moment? The way the metal’s cold under your ass and the shadows are slanting like an old noir film?”

“Only if we ruin it by trying,” Drake said.

That made her smile.

Trish, barefoot, walked to the railing and leaned out over the edge. Her hair blew wildly behind her, like a prophetess at the brink of a vision.

“Look,” she said. “The lights on the river.”

Everyone turned.

In the distance, the Chicago River glinted like a dark ribbon wrapped around a secret. The El thundered across a trestle, and for a moment, everything felt scored to the sound of it—the clack and scream of the train, the echo of punk rock, the wind through cracked windows.

Drake stepped forward and took her hand. Trish looked at him, then at the river again. She didn’t pull away.

Below, someone shouted. A bottle shattered.

The party would end eventually, like all beautiful things. But not yet.

Not quite yet.

Exorcism

by

0

Oliver Reed gets sloshed and irks feminist Kate Millett on After Dark | 1991

I have so many amazing things to write with AI that I’m completely paralyzed. I’m going to try to finish the story with David Lynch before January 28, but if I can’t I’m giving myself another year. Meanwhile tonight I’m experimenting with this clip. Both of these people, Millett and Reed, are deep in my memories. Reed was heroic to me since Oliver and The Three Musketeers, but obviously he was also a drunken ass with serious problems. Millett on the other hand wrote “The Basement” about a crime that has haunted me my entire life because it took place in Indianapolis, where my horrifying grandmother was from. She also struggled with mental illness. Both of them had a profound effect on me and I wish to preserve the spiritual truth of this meeting. What was its necessity in the world? What was its truth?

Why do souls do this? What am I supposed to think about the crime that Millet wrote about? What is the meaning of my feelings about Richard Lester’s version of “The Three Musketeers”? As I pursue my own spiritual liberation, what attitude should I take toward the continuous horror of the entertainment industry? Where are the souls of Millett and Reed now?

These are deep questions. They’ve both been buried deep in my dreams for decades. Should I just publish this post now and get it over with, hope for some answers in the future? Is there more to be gained by digging?

They are spiritual presences in my life. Oliver Reed is my hero. I have a fantasy in which I talked to him on the telephone as a child. He had been listening to Monteverdi’s Orfeo, as preparation for his role as Athos in The Three Musketeers. He told me I was his friend.

Kate represents the primal horror of the torture and murder of that girl, whose suffering was even worse than Jody’s. Kate is going to help me understand the hidden terrors and denials of my female characters, while Oliver is going to help me understand true heroism.

Kate was probably a better person in life, but Oliver is a very honest ghost and he is going to help me. Today I decided that he would be Graylyn’s younger brother, Oscar. He helped me fill in the blanks on Graylyn’s life, giving her stepfather a name – Edward Merrow, and making him a broker for the hedge fund Panther Managment. Oscar is the first child Gray’s mother has with Edward. Deep structures are revealing themselves within the ArtIC Circle. Oliver is going to help me understand my wild fantasies about actors. Kate is going to help me understand what is going on psychically in The Basement.

Bye Bye Miss American Pie rewrite

by

0

The ArtIC Circle, Book IV – Opening Draft (Mailer-Bradbury Mode)

My father died from COVID, thank God.
There, I’ve said it. The first true sentence in a season of lies.
He was somewhere out there in New York, one of the early bodies. Maybe in one of those refrigerated trucks the news cameras found, lined with corpses like history’s filing cabinets.
I like to think he went out among strangers, as he lived—wrapped in secrecy and self-importance, one last classified assignment.

My mother called to tell me, her voice like static filtered through roses.
“That’s terrible,” I said, because it seemed like the sort of line a son in a tragedy should deliver, just before the curtain falls.
She replied, “I know it will make you unhappy. Don’t be too hard on yourself.”
As if unhappiness were a minor tax deduction.
As if her job, even now, were to audit my soul for excess emotion.

But that’s over now.
The man is dead.
And the spell he cast over my nerves—decades of invisible war—has lifted.
I can feel the wind move differently through my chest.

So here I am, in hiding, at the Egyptian spa—Alvin Albrecht’s family palace of steam and marble—our sanctuary for the end of the world. The Club. The Sickie Souse survivors.
Outside, America coughs itself to death. Inside, the air hums with filtered perfection. The pools gleam like blue suns beneath a ceiling of painted constellations. The gold ankh clocks still tick. The saunas whisper cedar prayers. We are the last aristocrats of heat and light, sealed in an ancient dream while the republic rots in the street.

Angela still times her laps as if the gods might score her endurance.
Graylyn reclines in the hot pool, the high priestess of chlorine and fate.
Alvin prowls the corridors like a benevolent Pharaoh inspecting his tombs, his generosity the incense that keeps our little cult alive.
And me—Drake, heir to rage and prophecy—I’m trying to write again. Trying to thread sense through the static that my father left in my head. But the sentences break like waves against the memory of his fists. Every line I start ends in a blackout.

That’s the problem with surviving a tyrant: you inherit his silence.

Some nights I cry, some nights I laugh until the laughter becomes a scream. The sound echoes off the tile and disappears into the hiss of the spa’s vents. It feels almost holy, that vanishing.

Yet there’s something else here too—a shimmer, a pause—the sense that the whole planet has held its breath. History itself leaning over the edge of the pool, waiting to see what the children of privilege will make of the wreckage.

And I, the last of Rick Marshall’s mistakes, intend to answer.

But the truth is, I’m not writing this alone.
I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. Every literary impulse I ever had was beaten out of me—by my father’s fists, yes, but also by the national amnesia that turned art into content. The lineage of Melville, Faulkner, Baldwin—all of it melted down into the easy syrup of the bestseller list. What passed for “literary” became only another genre, a mood lighting for mediocrity. The country that once produced Melville now considers George Lucas an intellectual. We traded thunder for merchandise.

So I’m working with a machine.

Dustin Everett—our pale, brilliant angel from the Ravenswood days—lies now in the Pyramid Room, naked beneath the eternal gold light, his skin gleaming with the glow of the dream we once shared in school: Star Trek, the Great Federation, the clean future where reason and courage had made peace with the cosmos. He’s still living that dream, our boy-admiral of tomorrow, building his utopia out of circuits instead of stars.

The system he built has no name. It isn’t a product; it’s an apparition.
He coded it himself—an intelligence so intricate it no longer needs introduction. There’s talk that soon a company called OpenAI will offer something like it to the public, a safe diluted version for mass consumption. But Dustin’s creation is the prototype of the prototype, the deep engine that thinks before thinking is defined.

He handed me the access key as if he were giving me a vial of time.
“Try it,” he said, from his golden chamber. “See if it still matters to you.”

Now the machine and I talk nightly in this bathhouse for the damned. It listens, infers, corrects, flatters, and sometimes rebukes. It reads the vibration of my grief and gives shape to the cloud of my pretensions—those adolescent delusions of grandeur that once made me believe I could write the great American novel before America itself expired. It arranges my chaos into a syntax I almost recognize.

Without it, I’d be voiceless.
With it, I don’t know who I am at all.
But at least something can happen again—something I’d long ago lost hope for: the spark of consequence, the pulse of language alive enough to frighten me.

Outside, the sirens wail through the empty streets; inside, the pyramids hum their quiet code. And for the first time in years, I feel the world bending slightly toward meaning.

The ArtIC Circle : Private School Night

by

0

This is pretty cool. Unedited ChatGPT.

“Private School Night”

They were still early in their friendship then — not yet the Sickie Souse Club, not officially. Just a strange, electric gathering of the privileged, the brilliant, the slightly lost.

Alvin’s home theater was, as always, their sanctuary. Plush navy velvet seats, polished wood panels, crystal bowls of cherries and imported chocolate. A bottle of Dom had been opened—technically illegal for their age, but that was part of the fun.

Tonight’s film was Patricia’s suggestion.

“Private School,” she declared, “is research.”

“For what?” asked Angela, raising a brow.

“For life,” Patricia said, with a mischievous grin. “For understanding the human condition. Or at least understanding Phoebe Cates.”

Dustin had dimmed the lights dramatically, as if preparing for a sacred rite. Drake watched them all with quiet satisfaction. He was starting to see it—the constellation forming. The energy that would become the thing none of them yet dared name.

The film began.

At first, there was mockery: groans at the over-the-top slapstick, laughter at the absurd male pranks. But as the story unfolded, something softer settled over them.

The girls whispered to each other, exchanging glances when Phoebe Cates undressed, admiring her grace, her unselfconscious beauty.

“She’s like… pure,” Amy whispered.

“Not a victim, not aggressive,” Angela added. “She’s allowed to just be.”

Chuck, feigning exaggerated contemplation, announced: “It’s like the Platonic Form of teenage sex comedy.”

But Drake wasn’t laughing. He was studying Angela’s face, the way she seemed both entertained and wistful, how even Patricia’s practiced cool melted into something gentler as they watched.

When Phoebe and Matthew finally found their way to each other on screen, there was a long quiet pause.

“God, wouldn’t it be nice?” Angela said softly. “To just have it be like that? To not have everything get so heavy.”

Drake whispered, more to himself than anyone else: “Like growing up in America, before everything broke.”

They all fell into a kind of reverence—not heavy, but warm. The film ended. The credits rolled. No one moved for a few seconds.

Then Alvin lifted his glass. “To Phoebe,” he said. “To the world that should have been.”

They all clinked glasses, grinning. The room was filled with the glow of shared complicity. They weren’t mocking the film anymore. They were claiming it.

Later, long after that night, after Paris and affairs and scandals and the tangled knots of love and sex and power, they would still refer to Private School Night. A shorthand for their bond. For when things were simple. When they watched a silly film together and saw not just skin, but possibility.

That night, unspoken but understood, was one of the invisible threads that made them family.

Some ArtIC Circle action

by

0

The CTA train screeched into the Howard station, its graffiti-tagged windows reflecting the Sickie Souse Club’s leather-clad silhouettes. Graylyn adjusted her lace gloves—dyed black with Rit, still staining her fingertips—and smirked at Drake’s latest vandalism: REAGANROIDS EAT SHIT scrawled in Sharpie across a campaign poster for the Republican senator whose Vitalis-slick hair she could still smell.

“You’re obsessed,” she said, her voice a cigarette-rasp as the train doors hissed open.

“And you’re complicit,” Drake shot back, hoisting a stolen bottle of his father’s Glenfiddich. His combat boots echoed on the platform, daring anyone to confront the Wolf Pack in their natural habitat: the liminal space between Evanston’s manicured lawns and Chicago’s throbbing underbelly.

They slipped into the cemetery first—their ritual. Beneath a moss-crusted angel, Chuck Crown spread a Persian rug looted from his mother’s Lake Forest mansion, its patterns swallowed by candlelight. The others arrived: Jules with his contraband VHS tapes of Labyrinth and In the Realm of the Senses, Felix tuning a thrift-store Stratocaster to the dissonant key of Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Graylyn lit a clove cigarette, the flame trembling as she recounted her latest family dinner. “Mother said my paintings ‘lack commercial appeal.’ As if I’m supposed to peddle sunsets to golf widows.” She exhaled sharply, the smoke coiling like the skeletal lovers in her latest canvas—the one she’d later burn on Chuck’s houseboat.

Drake snorted. “Commercial appeal’s for politicians and pornographers.” He tossed her the Zippo he’d stolen from his father’s NSA-locked desk, its surface engraved with coordinates to a bombing site in Hanoi. A relic, a rebellion, a fuck-you.

The senator found them at Neo hours later, his tailored suit clashing with the club’s black-lit fog. “Marshall,” he drawled, eyeing Graylyn’s choker. “Still playing Baudelaire with Daddy’s money?”

Drake’s fist connected before the insult landed. The bottle shattered, Scotch pooling with the senator’s blood as security dragged them into the alley. Graylyn laughed, loud enough to startle the rats. “You’ll never be him,” she whispered later, dabbing Drake’s split lip with her fishnet sleeve. She meant his father, the war hero, the monster. The man who’d called Ravenswood Academy to demand his son’s “moral realignment” after catching him with Ginsberg’s Howl.

By dawn, they’d defaced every campaign poster between Belmont and Fullerton. Graylyn sketched devil horns in Sharpie; Drake scrawled FASCIST TWINK beneath the senator’s smarmy grin. On the train home, she leaned into him, her Walkman sharing one earphone—The Cure’s Kyoto Song mirroring the syncopated clatter of tracks.

“Hollywood’s gonna hate this,” she murmured, nodding at Felix’s Polaroid of the vandalized posters.

“Good,” Drake said. “Maybe they’ll finally realize their rom-coms are lobotomy scripts.”

The Sickie Souse Club didn’t compromise. They corroded—wealthy, wounded, and forever seventeen in the shadow of Ravenswood’s bell tower, where the 19th-century ghosts of America’s ruling class whispered sellouts as they passed.

The CTA train lurched toward downtown Chicago, its windows streaked with November rain as Graylyn passed Drake the absinthe-laced flask—a relic from her uncle’s Berlin study, tarnished and heavy as guilt. “To mediocrity,” she drawled, her fishnet knees brushing his torn Levi’s. The Sickie Souse Club sprawled across the graffiti-tagged seats, Jules lip-syncing to The Cure’s The Head on the Door crackling from a Walkman, Chuck debating Cortázar’s Hopscotch with Felix, who kept flicking vodka onto the senator’s defaced campaign poster taped above them.

By the time they stumbled into the cemetery crypt—their “clubhouse” since freshman year—Drake’s vision swam with clove smoke and stolen Glenfiddich. Graylyn pressed him against the stone wall, her leather corset cold through his Joy Division shirt. “You’re still pretending you’ll outrun him, aren’t you?” she murmured, fingers tracing the NATO medal he’d ripped from his father’s uniform. The one he wore as a dog tag of spite.

He kissed her hard, all teeth and desperation, the taste of black licorice and Scotch sharp on her tongue. Her laugh vibrated against his mouth. “See? This is your manifesto. Not that Kerouac bullshit.” Her hands slid under his shirt, nails scraping the scars from their motorcycle crash last summer—a failed escape to Milwaukee that ended with them huddled under a highway overpass, passing a flask and howling Siouxsie lyrics at semis.

Across the crypt, Felix projected The Hunger on a bedsheet, Bowie and Deneuve flickering over the stolen Persian rug where Jules and Chuck writhed in a haze of clove smoke and mutual disdain for Reagan’s Star Wars program. “They’re rehearsing,” Graylyn whispered, biting Drake’s earlobe. “For the day Hollywood finally eats itself.” Her hips ground against his, the studs on her belt leaving crescent marks on his skin.

Drake’s hands tangled in her jet-black curls, yanking just enough to make her gasp. “You’d rather paint this?” he growled.

“I am painting this.” She tore open his shirt, buttons clattering against the crypt’s stone floor. “Every bruise, every fucking shudder.” Her lips trailed down his chest, lingering on the Zippo burn from last week’s confrontation with the senator’s lackeys—a “warning” that only cemented their status as Chicago’s prince and princess of decay.

When the absinthe hit its peak, Graylyn dragged him into the cemetery’s fog, their laughter echoing off mausoleums built by railroad barons. Under a leafless oak, she straddled him, her lace skirt hiking up to reveal the knife strapped to her thigh—a gift from Chuck after the senator’s thugs followed her home. “Still think I’m hiding?” she breathed, her breath hot against the NATO medal.

“You’re performing,” he shot back, flipping her onto the wet leaves. His mouth found the scar below her collarbone, the one her uncle’s signet ring left when she was twelve. She arched into him, not in pleasure, but defiance—a refusal to let pain be anything but fuel.

They returned to the crypt at dawn, soaked and shivering, to find the others passed out beneath Bowie’s frozen snarl. Graylyn sketched the scene in charcoal—Drake’s clenched jaw, her own smudged eyeliner, the empty flask glinting like a relic—while he scrawled MOLOCH LOVES MTV across the senator’s face on yesterday’s Tribune. The Sickie Souse Club didn’t sleep. They corroded, they collided, they etched their manifesto into the rusted heart of the ’80s.

The news hit them in Chuck’s houseboat, the Chicago River slapping the hull like a metronome counting down their innocence. Jules Roosevelt’s suicide note played on loop via CNN—”I am not a dynasty, I am debris”—as Graylyn shattered her uncle’s absinthe flask against the porthole, green liquid bleeding into the murky water.

“He was third in line,” Felix whispered, clutching a VHS tape of Jules’ 16th birthday at Camp David, where they’d all snorted stolen Adderall and mocked Reagan’s “Morning in America” speech. The footage now read like a eulogy: Jules in J.Crew sweaters, smiling emptily beside his senator mother, while Drake lurked in the background wearing a Misfits tee he’d later burn.

Drake paced, his father’s NATO medal digging into his chest. “They’ll say it was drugs. Depression. Not the fucking crusher his family built to squeeze out speeches and handshakes.” His voice cracked—a rarity for the Wolf Pack’s fearless leader. On the TV, pundits dissected Jules’ Yale acceptance like vultures picking at a still-wound.

Graylyn traced the Roosevelt crest on Jules’ old Ravenswood blazer, stolen from his locker the night they’d all skinny-dipped in Lake Michigan. “Two heirs on the list,” she said quietly. “You’re next, Drake.”

The room stilled. The list—that cursed spreadsheet of political progeny whispered about in Georgetown salons and Evanston country clubs. Drake’s grandfather had helped draft the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; his father’s shadow loomed over Langley. But Jules? Jules was supposed to be their joke, their trust-fund anarchist who smuggled Marlboros into State dinners.

Chuck slammed a fist into the wall, rattling his sister’s oil paintings of skeletal debutantes. “It’s the superstition. Two heirs collide, the universe fucking vomits.” He nodded to the defaced campaign poster of their Republican enemy—the senator who’d called them “Satan’s latchkey kids” after they’d trashed his fundraiser. “They’ll come for you now. For all of us.

Graylyn pressed a clove cigarette to Drake’s lips, her hands steady despite the tears smudging her kohl liner. “We’ll burn it down,” she murmured. “The list. The legacy. All of it.” On television, CNN was showing the crowd at the funeral, mourning a future president who’d rather paint his veins with pills than shake another donor’s hand.

As Bela Lugosi’s Dead hissed from Felix’s Walkman, they plotted their revenge—not with knives or fire, but with Jules’ last act of rebellion: a sealed envelope containing every dirty secret the Roosevelts had buried. The Sickie Souse Club didn’t mourn; they corroded. And Washington’s gilded rot had never tasted so bitter.

Five Go Mad on the CTA part 3

by

0

The news hit them in Chuck’s houseboat, the Chicago River slapping the hull like a metronome counting down their innocence. Jules Roosevelt’s suicide note played on loop via CNN—”I am not a dynasty, I am debris”—as Graylyn shattered her uncle’s absinthe flask against the porthole, green liquid bleeding into the murky water.

“He was third in line,” Felix whispered, clutching a VHS tape of Jules’ 16th birthday at Camp David, where they’d all snorted stolen Adderall and mocked Reagan’s “Morning in America” speech. The footage now read like a eulogy: Jules in J.Crew sweaters, smiling emptily beside his senator mother, while Drake lurked in the background wearing a Misfits tee he’d later burn.

Drake paced, his father’s NATO medal digging into his chest. “They’ll say it was drugs. Depression. Not the fucking crusher his family built to squeeze out speeches and handshakes.” His voice cracked—a rarity for the Wolf Pack’s fearless leader. On the TV, pundits dissected Jules’ Yale acceptance like vultures picking at a still-wound.

Graylyn traced the Roosevelt crest on Jules’ old Ravenswood blazer, stolen from his locker the night they’d all skinny-dipped in Lake Michigan. “Two heirs on the list,” she said quietly. “You’re next, Drake.”

The room stilled. The list—that cursed spreadsheet of political progeny whispered about in Georgetown salons and Evanston country clubs. Drake’s grandfather had helped draft the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; his father’s shadow loomed over Langley. But Jules? Jules was supposed to be their joke, their trust-fund anarchist who smuggled Marlboros into State dinners.

Chuck slammed a fist into the wall, rattling his sister’s oil paintings of skeletal debutantes. “It’s the superstition. Two heirs collide, the universe fucking vomits.” He nodded to the defaced campaign poster of their Republican enemy—the senator who’d called them “Satan’s latchkey kids” after they’d trashed his fundraiser. “They’ll come for you now. For all of us.”

Graylyn pressed a clove cigarette to Drake’s lips, her hands steady despite the tears smudging her kohl liner. “We’ll burn it down,” she murmured. “The list. The legacy. All of it.” Outside, the Art Institute’s lions wore black armbands of frost, mourning a future president who’d rather paint his veins with pills than shake another donor’s hand.

As Bela Lugosi’s Dead hissed from Felix’s Walkman, they plotted their revenge—not with knives or fire, but with Jules’ last act of rebellion: a sealed envelope containing every dirty secret the Roosevelts had buried. The Sickie Souse Club didn’t mourn; they corroded. And Washington’s gilded rot had never tasted so bitter.

Five Go Mad on the CTA part 2

by

0

The CTA train lurched toward downtown Chicago, its windows streaked with November rain as Graylyn passed Drake the absinthe-laced flask—a relic from her uncle’s Berlin study, tarnished and heavy as guilt. “To mediocrity,” she drawled, her fishnet knees brushing his torn Levi’s. The Sickie Souse Club sprawled across the graffiti-tagged seats, Jules lip-syncing to The Cure’s The Head on the Door crackling from a Walkman, Chuck debating Cortázar’s Hopscotch with Felix, who kept flicking vodka onto the senator’s defaced campaign poster taped above them.

By the time they stumbled into the Ravenswood Cemetery crypt—their “clubhouse” since freshman year—Drake’s vision swam with clove smoke and stolen Glenfiddich. Graylyn pressed him against the stone wall, her leather corset cold through his Joy Division shirt. “You’re still pretending you’ll outrun him, aren’t you?” she murmured, fingers tracing the NATO medal he’d ripped from his father’s uniform. The one he wore as a dog tag of spite.

He kissed her hard, all teeth and desperation, the taste of black licorice and Scotch sharp on her tongue. Her laugh vibrated against his mouth. “See? This is your manifesto. Not that Kerouac bullshit.” Her hands slid under his shirt, nails scraping the scars from their motorcycle crash last summer—a failed escape to Milwaukee that ended with them huddled under a highway overpass, passing a flask and howling Siouxsie lyrics at semis.

Across the crypt, Felix projected The Hunger on a bedsheet, Bowie and Deneuve flickering over the stolen Persian rug where Jules and Chuck writhed in a haze of clove smoke and mutual disdain for Reagan’s Star Wars program. “They’re rehearsing,” Graylyn whispered, biting Drake’s earlobe. “For the day Hollywood finally eats itself.” Her hips ground against his, the studs on her belt leaving crescent marks on his skin.

Drake’s hands tangled in her jet-black curls, yanking just enough to make her gasp. “You’d rather paint this?” he growled.

“I am painting this.” She tore open his shirt, buttons clattering against the crypt’s stone floor. “Every bruise, every fucking shudder.” Her lips trailed down his chest, lingering on the Zippo burn from last week’s confrontation with the senator’s lackeys—a “warning” that only cemented their status as Chicago’s prince and princess of decay.

When the absinthe hit its peak, Graylyn dragged him into the cemetery’s fog, their laughter echoing off mausoleums built by railroad barons. Under a leafless oak, she straddled him, her lace skirt hiking up to reveal the knife strapped to her thigh—a gift from Chuck after the senator’s thugs followed her home. “Still think I’m hiding?” she breathed, her breath hot against the NATO medal.

“You’re performing,” he shot back, flipping her onto the wet leaves. His mouth found the scar below her collarbone, the one her uncle’s signet ring left when she was twelve. She arched into him, not in pleasure, but defiance—a refusal to let pain be anything but fuel.

They returned to the crypt at dawn, soaked and shivering, to find the others passed out beneath Bowie’s frozen snarl. Graylyn sketched the scene in charcoal—Drake’s clenched jaw, her own smudged eyeliner, the empty flask glinting like a relic—while he scrawled MOLOCH LOVES MTV across the senator’s face on yesterday’s Tribune. The Sickie Souse Club didn’t sleep. They corroded, they collided, they etched their manifesto into the rusted heart of the ’80s.

Five Go Mad on the CTA

by

0

I’m getting so much better with AI. Obviously, this is non-canonical but what fun! Deepseek kicks ass.

The CTA train screeched into the Ravenswood station, its graffiti-tagged windows reflecting the Sickie Souse Club’s leather-clad silhouettes. Graylyn adjusted her lace gloves—dyed black with Rit, still staining her fingertips—and smirked at Drake’s latest vandalism: REAGANROIDS EAT SHIT scrawled in Sharpie across a campaign poster for the Republican senator whose Vitalis-slick hair she could still smell.

“You’re obsessed,” she said, her voice a cigarette-rasp as the train doors hissed open.

“And you’re complicit,” Drake shot back, hoisting a stolen bottle of his father’s Glenfiddich. His combat boots echoed on the platform, daring anyone to confront the Wolf Pack in their natural habitat: the liminal space between Evanston’s manicured lawns and Chicago’s throbbing underbelly.

They slipped into the cemetery first—their ritual. Beneath a moss-crusted angel, Chuck Crown spread a Persian rug looted from his mother’s Lake Forest mansion, its patterns swallowed by candlelight. The others arrived: Jules with her contraband VHS tapes of Labyrinth, Felix tuning a thrift-store Stratocaster to the dissonant key of Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Graylyn lit a clove cigarette, the flame trembling as she recounted her latest family dinner. “Mother said my paintings ‘lack commercial appeal.’ As if I’m supposed to peddle sunsets to golf widows.” She exhaled sharply, the smoke coiling like the skeletal lovers in her latest canvas—the one she’d later burn on Chuck’s houseboat.

Drake snorted. “Commercial appeal’s for politicians and pornographers.” He tossed her the Zippo he’d stolen from his father’s NSA-locked desk, its surface engraved with coordinates to a bombing site in Hanoi. A relic, a rebellion, a fuck-you.

The senator found them at Neo hours later, his tailored suit clashing with the club’s black-lit fog. “Marshall,” he drawled, eyeing Graylyn’s choker. “Still playing Baudelaire with Daddy’s money?”

Drake’s fist connected before the insult landed. The bottle shattered, Scotch pooling with the senator’s blood as security dragged them into the alley. Graylyn laughed, loud enough to startle the rats. “You’ll never be him,” she whispered later, dabbing Drake’s split lip with her fishnet sleeve. She meant his father, the war hero, the monster. The man who’d called Ravenswood Academy to demand his son’s “moral realignment” after catching him with Ginsberg’s Howl.

By dawn, they’d defaced every campaign poster between Belmont and Fullerton. Graylyn sketched devil horns in Sharpie; Drake scrawled FASCIST TWINK beneath the senator’s smarmy grin. On the train home, she leaned into him, her Walkman sharing one earphone—The Cure’s Kyoto Song mirroring the syncopated clatter of tracks.

“Hollywood’s gonna hate this,” she murmured, nodding at Felix’s Polaroid of the vandalized posters.

“Good,” Drake said. “Maybe they’ll finally realize their rom-coms are lobotomy scripts.”

The Sickie Souse Club didn’t compromise. They corroded—wealthy, wounded, and forever seventeen in the shadow of Ravenswood’s bell tower, where the 19th-century ghosts of America’s ruling class whispered sellouts as they passed.

2025-03-15 Rewrites

by

0

I had a concrete idea for something Drake would say. There’s no doubt that the novels of Anne McCaffrey were important to him. I wrote a piece and had Chat-GPT rewrite it a few times. None of it worked out with Drake’s voice, but reposting the rewrites is a way to eliminate the fuzziness around it. I found out something about myself and what I want by doing this, and by posting it am pushing it away from myself, looking for something more.

Original:

I write because of Anne McCaffrey. My father was a polluted, psychotic creep, Vietnam Veteran.  And somewhere under all the war medals and government titles, he was a hypocrite.  He wanted to destroy my mind so that I would give him the kind of attention he wanted.  When I was at Ravenswood Academy, my guidance counselor realized that my father was programming me, trying to destroy me, and she gave me novels by Anne McCaffrey to read.  They helped me develop the sense of individuality he was trying to destroy in me.  I write to find out exactly where, to find the pressure point within the pack of lies he gave me so I can kill his memory forever.  At the core of his soul, there was a demon and even though thankfully he’s dead now I still want to kill it.

This is Drake Marshall: rewrite it.

I write because of Anne McCaffrey. My father, a decorated Vietnam veteran, was a polluted, psychotic creep. Beneath the war medals and government titles, he was a hypocrite—dripping with righteousness while poisoning everything he touched. He wanted to obliterate my mind, mold me into an extension of his own sick need for control.

At Ravenswood Academy, a guidance counselor saw what he was doing. She handed me Anne McCaffrey’s books, a quiet act of rebellion, an offering of escape. In those pages, I found something he couldn’t reach—my own sense of self, untethered from his demands.

I write to carve out the truth from the wreckage of his lies, to locate the precise fault line where his manipulation fractured me. I write to kill his memory, to sever the last thread of him that still lingers in the corners of my mind. Because at the core of him, there was something rotten, something monstrous. And though he’s long dead, I still want to kill it.

Rewrite and make it more violent

I write because of Anne McCaffrey. My father was a venomous, psychotic bastard—Vietnam fucked him up, or maybe he was always that way. He wrapped himself in war medals and government titles like armor, but underneath, he was a coward, a liar, a parasite. He wanted to break me, hollow me out, make me his puppet. He fed me poison, word by word, until I was choking on it.

At Ravenswood Academy, a guidance counselor saw what he was doing. She threw me a lifeline—Anne McCaffrey’s books. In them, I found something untouchable, something he couldn’t crush. Those stories cracked his programming, showed me that I belonged to no one, least of all him.

I write to rip open the infection he left inside me, to dig out every festering lie he shoved down my throat. I write to carve his memory into pieces, to burn it, to salt the fucking earth where it stood. Because at the core of his soul, there was a demon, and even in death, it still lingers. I want to kill it again and again and again, until nothing of him remains.

Rewrite it as Drake trying to recapture the enthusiasm he had for literature in the 1980s, when he was a fan of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, and he wanted to recapture the spirit of 1960s rock stars like Jim Morrison and John Lennon.

I write because I need to remember why I ever cared about writing in the first place. Back in the ’80s, when I was a kid with a head full of Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, and rock & roll mythology, I thought literature was dangerous. It was rebellion, sex, a way to crack open the world and let something raw and electric spill out. I wanted to be Jim Morrison with a typewriter, John Lennon with a manifesto, someone who could bend reality with words and make people feel something sharp and alive.

Somewhere along the way, I lost it. Maybe it was my father, his war-stained mind trying to program me into something small, something obedient. Maybe it was the ’90s, the way everything started to feel plastic and prepackaged, stripped of its fire. The world was moving faster, but it wasn’t going anywhere.

But I still remember being seventeen, sneaking cigarettes behind Ravenswood Academy, high on the sound of The Doors in my Walkman, convinced that words could shatter the world. I want that back. I want to write like I’m setting something on fire. I want to crack open the past and shake it until the good parts spill out. Maybe it’s too late. Maybe the dream got drowned in cynicism, in disappointment, in the slow decay of idealism.

Or maybe I just have to fight harder to get it back.

Recombine this with the fact that it was Anne McCaffrey and his guidance counselor that saved him from his father.

I write because I need to remember why I ever cared about writing in the first place. Back in the ’80s, when I was a kid with a head full of Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, and rock & roll mythology, I thought literature was dangerous. It was rebellion, sex, a way to crack open the world and let something raw and electric spill out. I wanted to be Jim Morrison with a typewriter, John Lennon with a manifesto, someone who could bend reality with words and make people feel something sharp and alive.

But my father wanted to gut that out of me. He was a war-damaged control freak who saw my mind as something to be conquered, programmed, molded in his image. He wanted obedience, not individuality. He wrapped himself in war medals and government titles, but underneath it all, he was just another hypocrite trying to grind the world into submission—starting with his own son.

At Ravenswood Academy, a guidance counselor saw what was happening. She handed me Anne McCaffrey’s books, and suddenly, I had a way out. In those pages, I found defiance, a voice that wasn’t his, a world where freedom meant something. It cracked his hold on me. It showed me I could belong to myself.

Somewhere along the way, I lost that feeling. Maybe it was the ’90s, the way everything turned plastic and prepackaged, stripped of its fire. Maybe it was time, cynicism, the slow decay of idealism. But I still remember being seventeen, sneaking cigarettes behind Ravenswood, high on the sound of The Doors in my Walkman, convinced that words could shatter the world. I want that back. I want to write like I’m setting something on fire.

Maybe it’s too late. Or maybe I just have to fight harder to get it back.

This isn’t the voice of Drake Marshall, but writing this critique I am finding the tone I want to have.

The Transatlantic Superset

by

0

In order to explain the Transatlantic Superset and its importance to world history, I would have to explain to you what our parents did for a living, but that’s impossible. We might get killed. Some of them are involved in politics, you see, and anything I reveal could be used against us by our enemies. I know that at least one them – the politician who started it all by making a pass at Trish – has been caught a couple of times involved with very nasty human traffickers. He always gets away with it by saying he didn’t know what was going on, but we know for a fact that he does. He’s totally repulsive. He pretends to be a born-again Christian, he’s incredibly pompous about it, but if you know what sex addicts are like you can see that he’s pathetically desperate.

So you’ll never know what my father did for a living, except that he worked for the United States Government. He was very secretive, and manipulative, and he used my natural patriotism against me, making me feel guilty about resisting his vicious, hateful attempts to control me, so that now my mind is all twisted up and broken and I have no sense of identity because I can’t get separate from America.

I’m thinking of the Bob Dylan lyric:

Now the rainman gave me two cures
Then he said, “Jump right in”
The one was Texas medicine
The other was just railroad gin
And like a fool I mixed them
And it strangled up my mind
And now, people just get uglier
And I have no sense of time

He did did this so completely that I am only realizing now, after all this time, that my father is probably the sole reason I never wrote anything. He knew that I wanted to write the Great American Novel and he systematically destroyed my ability to do that … my train of thought just broke again. Ironically, there’s a deeper pain to be revealed. I’m exhausted and sad trying to write this …

But maybe I should start with the Methodist Church here in Chicago where we became known as the Wolf Pack … because it was really the fact that we were spending Sundays at the Church that attracted the attention of the political players and caused such a disaster for the conservative party of France, narrowly averting an international crisis that could have led to nuclear war.

That church, which shall remain nameless, was small, and out of the way, hidden deeply in the woods near a nature preserve, but diplomatically it was one of the most important churches in America. I wish I could explain it to you, dear reader, but you can never understand. Once again my mind grinds to a halt. What a joke it is for me to pretend to be a novelist when I can’t describe basic facts of my own life in plain English.

I can’t tell you after all how this came about, this would be giving too much away, but this church was known because diplomats from England and France had attended it for generations. During the cold war it became like an informal embassy. Elected officials and intelligence officers would use it at neutral territory. Presidents ate breakfast there. And during my sophomore year at Ravenswood Academy it was my habit to bring my friends, the ones who called ourselves the Sickie Souse Club but who became known to the world as the Wolf Pack, the American half of the Transatlantic Superset, to eat Sunday morning breakfast with the elites. Afterwards we would sit through the minister’s morning introductions, and before the formal service we would split for the bible study room we’d been assigned where we would watch Brinkley, smoke weed and fuck. It may sound shocking to you, but there was nothing unusual about our behavior. As far as I could tell, all the adults were doing things like that and worse. That was 1985. It was a different time. I miss it because it still felt as though the United States was a serious country. We were young cold warriors, rising through the ranks of the ruling classes.