"You are doomed, Johnny Weird!"
                    Johnny laughed.
                    "We," I intoned in my best Lamont Cranston voice, "are the damned!"
                    "And how, may I ask, did we reach this state?" asked Johnny, trying to match my solemn tone.
                    "Oh, dear friends, it is not a state." Dramatic Pause. "But a lack of it. A state of Grace, oh lost one, is what we are lacking."
                    Johnny grinned and looked out the car window before making a left, getting onto the unnamed back road leading to the highway. The woods were so thick on this route that no moonlight shone through; Johnny's headlights were the only illumination. "I think," he said, "we're stuck in the state of Massachusetts. As infernal of a state as I can imagine."
                    "True, true." I rubbed my chin in contemplation.
                    "Where'd this come from, Howard? You get religion on me?"
                    "No, but I think I spilled some religion on your seat." I gave Johnny a moment to laugh at my joke, but he didn't—he's very protective of his car, an old Chevrolet he bought last year with money from his summer job. We always joke about getting fuzzy dice for his Chevy, like that song.
                    "I just found an interesting word today,” I said.
                    "And the word of the day is...?"
                    "Preterite."
                    "Don't know it," says Johnny, pursing his lips and tightening his chin as if searching the card catalogue of his brain for the lost word.
                    "Neither did I. Had to look it up. It's like 'the un-chosen'."
                    "Anything like the uncola?"
                    "Hmmm, could be. But it has to do with how in certain sects of Christianity, some of the people are The Chosen. But for there to be the chosen, there have to be people who aren't, right?"
                    "Whoa, like God didn't pick you for his baseball team."
                    "Yeah." I had a painful flashback to junior high gym class, where I not only was always picked last, the captains of the teams would argue over who had to take me. No one wanted the fat kid on their team. "So some people are selected and the others God passes by."
                    "And some people's parents have money, and they get the nice looking chicks and go to whatever college they want..."
                    I slumped back in the passenger seat and sighed. We drove in silence.
                    "But maybe the damned are chosen in their own way," said Johnny Weird after a few minutes.
                    "I don't know. It seems to me that damnation is a lack of grace, not something in itself-- like cold is really a lack of heat or darkness is a lack of light. They are terms to describe the absence of something, not as, like, quantifiable things in themselves."
                    "I can see that train of thought," he said. "But I'm thinking about that blues song—'If it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all.' Or something maybe like the draft? Selective or perhaps selected service?"
                    The draft ended last year, and neither of us would turn eighteen until next year, but it was still a sore point with me. Until Ix-Non stopped it, I was convinced that my number would come up on my eighteenth birthday. This morbid conviction began in tenth grade civics class. Our teacher, Mrs. Quincy, decided to set up a series of debates with topics chosen at random. And there I was, nervous and awkward, up in front of the class to argue with Shirley Church on the nation's involvement in Viet Nam. Shirley was popular and pretty, and she started off talking about patriotism and duty, about heroism and honor. And though I felt like a homunculus standing up next to her, it immediately struck me that her arguments were illogical, specious and quite easy to dispute. And since I had done a special class project the previous year about the war's escalation, I even had a few facts to throw around. As I spoke about U.S. and civilian casualties and the ill effects of the war on our society, I felt in control, like I was speaking up for the noble cause of peace, like someone like John Lennon on TV, and putting insipid conformists like Shirley Church in their place. That is, until she started to cry. “My brother died in Viet Nam,” she sort of croaked out before running out of the room. And I just stood there as my stomach turned to ice and my face to fire. I think Mrs. Quincy may have been in shock as well, but I couldn't even look up. After what felt like forever, I made my way to my seat. As I sat down, Mickey Monroe, who sat behind me, kicked me in the back, hard. “You're a fucking dick, How-ard,” he said in a low voice, somehow making my name sound unnatural, horrible. “I should kick your ass for that, you pussy.” For that day, at least, he settled for pushing me around between classes, and I almost felt like I deserved it, though I would have preferred to perform my own repentant flagellation, thanks. And since that day, I had been convinced of my imminent induction.
                    "I see your point about the draft," I said quietly to Johnny.
                    "Y'know," Johnny went on, "like there could be other ways to be chosen, like touched by something, but not the hand of God."
                    "Right now," I said, "I feel like I've been touched by the hand of doodoo. Let's get some coffee, Johnny Weird."
                    As you may have surmised, Johnny's name isn't really Johnny Weird. It's actually Johnny Werd, but in 9th grade, during a discussion of “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, Suzy Jackson responded to a comment by Johnny, something he said about the Misfit's moral clarity, by saying, "You're not Johnny Werd, you're Johnny Weird!" Mrs. Stanton, our teacher, was not amused, but most of the class was, including Johnny, as he told me later. Most of the students in our class-- class of '74, just one more year and I'm out of this hellhole-- call him Johnny Weird, but not to his face. I'm the only one who does that, but then again, I'm probably his only real friend. That was my first year living in Crafton, 9th grade, the first year of high school, in which everyone's rôle was set. It was the year my parents died, when I moved in with my great aunt, Aunt Bess. I used to live in the outside world with my parents, in New York, before the accident. Then my life was taken apart and put together again, like trying to create a different picture from the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
                    So I was an outsider, and there aren't many outsiders in Crafton, because no one moved here. A hamlet surrounded by woods, not even on any direct routes to other cities, it's made up of hills, trees and a dried up community built around a small underwear factory that closed down in the 50s. Crafton was families that lived there for generations, who either worked in the small local businesses or commuted to other towns. Actually, my grandmother, Aunt Bess' sister, was from here, but she got away, escaped, was married and had my mom. Then she and my grandfather died. And my dad's parents died. Then my parents died, and there was no one else in my family except Aunt Bess, and there I was, in Crafton. And after living there three years, I was still an outsider.
                    Of course, Johnny, a native of Crafton, was born an outsider. I thought it was because he never had a father. Johnny and his mom seemed, at best, tolerated by people like my aunt, people of good standing, I guess you'd call them. I often wonder if Johnny had had a dad if he'd still be Johnny Weird. He looks normal and dresses pretty cool, especially as opposed to myself: overweight and bespectacled, garbed in lame attire and a sorry bowl haircut as decreed under the tyranny of Aunt Bess. I'd probably be an outsider if I had been born to the most prominent family in town. And I can tell that girls like Johnny, especially by how they act around him, like they always really need his help with something. And they talk about him—I've heard them. They talk about his long blond hair, his striking dark eyes, even his ass. Jeez.
                    "Let's listen to some music, How," said Johnny Weird, breaking me out of my depressed reverie. "Pick a cartridge."
                    I began to rummage through the box of 8-tracks on the passenger seat floor.
                    "What's that Beatles tape," I asked, "the one with that song where they sing, "I know what it's like to be dead”?
                    "Revolver. It's got a white cover with a collage on it."
                    The tape was found and popped into the player. It was 10:10 pm. We'd listen to tapes until Steve G. came on. As usual, Johnny came by earlier and picked me up, down the road from my aunt's house around 9:45, after she'd gone to bed and I'd snuck out.
                    We were heading out to The Grocery Stop & Shop, a little rundown store outside of town, near the highway. It was in the twilight between Crafton and the outside world, and over the last year since we discovered it, you could see the influence of the outside taking it over. As much as I learned to dislike the provincial life of Crafton, there was a certain sadness in seeing the small town world swallowed up by the plasticity replacing it, as found in The Grocery Stop & Shop's vacuum-packed ham and American cheese on white bread sandwich containers.
                    I went into the store while Johnny pumped gas. An old wooden building, it had a friendly worn out air about it, and I held a strange fondness for the dirty and cracked plastic sign out front. The lady who worked there every weekend was sorting cigarette packets into racks behind the counter.
                    "Hey, hon," she said. She called everyone "Hon", and had a hairstyle that reminds me of movies I saw when I was little. She not the kind of person I could ever picture hanging around with, but I liked her. She's not cool in the usual sense, but she's really a genuinely cool person. Existentially cool, as Johnny would say. "Saved the old coffee for you."
                    "Thanks." That was sort of joke of her's. We always bought the coffee that was old and burned, really nasty. It had more kick. She used to always offer to make us fresh coffee until we explained this. Then it became a joke between the three of us.
                    Before getting the coffee, I glanced at the comic book rack. Aunt Bess wouldn't let me keep comics, but I still looked at them; lots of monster titles, I noticed. Then I walked to the cooler to grab a couple of Cokes. They had the big bottles there, the ones you couldn't get in town. After that, I went over to the end of the counter and poured us four cups of coffee, lots of cream and sugar. I pick up some fresh batteries, as well.
                    “See ya, hon,” the counter woman said, smiling.
                    We headed back to town, and the Beatles tape played while I put the batteries in my portable radio. I never realized how important music was until I met Johnny. I had a few singles, like "Good Lovin'", "Pleasant Valley Sunday", “Little Deuce Coup”, and "Ruby Tuesday", that I got when I was little, but I didn't know what a powerful force in the universe music was.
                    "Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream," sang the Beatles, and I sat back and tried to take their advice. It was a comfortable summer evening, with just enough of a breeze with my window half down.
                    There were literally three stoplights in Crafton. We hit the second one, the one right before the movie theater, as one of the films let out. The building, which had to date back to the twenties, had been remodeled and split up into two separate theaters. It only showed movies on weekends, and they were usually movies that had already played in the outside world months ago. Tonight they were showing Deathdream, which we saw the night before and I liked, and Cabaret, which didn't interest me.
                    Mickey Monroe and a few of his cronies from the football team were on the corner, seemingly congregating around a post office box. Mickey saw the car and pointed us out to the others. As we sat at the light, he gave us the finger, aggressively arching his large frame forward, staring. Johnny stared back as we waited. I looked away. As Mickey liked to point out, he was all muscle (including his head, I often thought of adding), not to mention about half foot taller than myself. Even though Johnny wasn't afraid of him, I was.
                    As we pass the theater, I saw Vicky with Chad leaving and pointedly didn't care. They couldn't even tell I was watching them. I purposely turned away, not thinking about her, about them, about her. Damn.
                    As I looked at Johnny to make some stupid remark and prove I didn't care, I notice his attention was somewhere down the block, towards the next light.
                    On the corner was Jennifer, the new girl. Well, new for Crafton, she started at Crafton High after the last Christmas break. She was kind of pretty, with her long blond hair and everything, and Johnny told me he had a thing for her. I thought she was very much existentially cool, too, especially after she helped me with an end of semester class project last school year; she got her mom to laminate my display drawings for me. Johnny pulled up toward the curb, and I rolled my window all the way down. Jennifer was looked around, as if waiting for something. In her light summer dress, she looked even taller and thinner than she did in school. Jennifer also looked as if standing there on the corner of one of the three lights in Crafton was really the thing to do, very cool. I think she had what might be called poise.
                    “Hey,” said Johnny.
                    At that point I realized that she was probably purposely ignoring the car, not knowing who was in it.
                    "Johnny?" she asked, and laughed. "And Howard?"
                    I nodded, smiling stupidly.
                    “What's up?” asked Johnny.
                    “I was at the movie,” she said, pointing toward the theater. “What else is there to do around here?”
                    “Not a whole lot,” said Johnny.
                    "Hey," she said, indicating the car stereo, which was playing "Yellow Submarine". "My sister took me to see that movie when it came out. It was really cool."
                    "Um," said Johnny. "Do you need a ride?"
                    "Thanks." She sort of tilted her head down while looking up. "But my mom'll be picking me up in a second."
                    “Oh,” said Johnny. “What have…”
                    “There's my mom. I'd better go.” She gave Johnny a big smile and waved to both of us as she crossed the street to her mother's car. Johnny sat and stared, until someone behind us honked.
                    I looked at my watch. 10:57, three minutes to Steve G's show. We listened to Steve G every Saturday night, from 11 p.m. until they start to play religious shows at 4 am. During the week, the station, which came from the other side of the state, played classical music and news, plus some taped shows. Except for Sunday evenings, when they would play recordings of old radio programs, I never listened to WZQX. Just Sunday evenings and Saturday nights.
                    We took out the tape and turned on the car radio, which blared news about the military in Greece, as well as junk about Ix-Non and Gag Gnu. Then Steve G's intro music came on. It was a cool and crazy jazz piece, and we didn't know who it was by, but it had insistent drums and a smooth saxophone lead playing a catchy, yet intricate melody. It always sent a chill up my spine.
                    "It's time to open up your mind and let some air in," said the familiar voice over the music. "You're listening to 'Beneath the Bodhi Tree' on WZQX FM. I'm your host, Steve G, bringing you sounds from elsewhere."
                    And that was it for the intro. Steve G. rarely spoke on air during the show. Johnny said that G. did a number of other programs during the week, news, classical music and some old jazz, under the name Steven Grossman. Somehow that was disillusioning, that he had a real last name. "There is the real, and there is the perceived," Johnny had said with a wry smile. "and sometimes people are more comfortable with the illusion of reality over reality."
                    But now we had the "Bohdi Tree". Johnny called it a freeform music format. And though Steve G's mixture of experimental jazz, psychedelic rock, modern "classical" music, comedy records and other aural ephemera was chaotic and difficult to define, I believed there was a message, an order of some sort, in what G spun. Sometimes I wondered if the disc jockey was playing these records at random or as his mood dictated and the odd, stimulating juxtapositions were accidental, a combination of the I Ching and a Rorschach test to the listener, a psychological experiment. Other times, I suspected that each track was chosen to create an unfolding dialectic with the tracks preceding and following, a complex text in which each piece has multiple layers of meaning in the cabbalistic whole. That night, the first song was a long heavy guitar chug with pounding drums and chanted lyrics about being the "master of this universe". Neither Johnny nor I recognized it, but he said that he thought it was British. It fit my mood as we drove out of town, through back roads, into the dense woods, to the haunted house.
                    I don't think I believed in haunted houses when I lived on the outside. But in Crafton, it seemed possible. You could see the outside world creeping in, mostly through television, radio and movies, especially in the young people, but Crafton seemed to exist in a different era, one where a haunted house could exist. And it wasn't as if the outside world wasn't filled with stuff like astrology and Chariots of the Gods?, more modern forms of superstition, played on an electric, rather than acoustic, guitar to a beat you could dance to. Belief seemed to be key to reality. What society as a whole believed was real, right? And even though Crafton was being absorbed into the greater reality of the United States, its off-the-beaten-track location allowed it to hold onto its own beliefs as a smaller societal form. Like, I think an anthropologist could still get a little something out of Crafton as an example of an older, albeit dying, culture.
                    As Johnny guided the car through the dark trees, I loaded the fresh batteries into my radio.
                    From what little I knew about architecture, the house in question, a monolithic structure with a square shaped base, had to have built during Victorian times. The third floor was collapsing now, but had once supported a series of tower-like structures, one in each corner and another in the center. The center tower was the only one that hadn't collapsed, giving me the impression of the edifice as a fist with a defiant middle finger pointed skyward. It was painted green maybe 60 years ago, but most of it was flaked and discolored to grays and browns. We only knew it was green from some remnants we found beneath the porch. The porch was decorated in rotting wooden ornaments, all of basic geometric shapes. The building summed up a amalgamation I found very New England, the mixture of an American desire for impressive conspicuous consumption and a puritan desire to avoid ostentation.
                    We discovered the house last week, just driving around randomly through old dirt road, like we usually did on Saturdays. We took a turn here, one there, and there was the house. If I didn't know Johnny so well, I would have suspected that he'd been there before and was just pretending to discover the house with me. But he's not one for practical jokes. We walked around and checked it out and decided to come hang out at the haunted house at the next opportunity.
                    The lawn was now taken over by weeds, but whoever built the house had put an overabundance of stone walkways trailing through the grounds, and there was now a little road through the grass to the house from our previous trip. Johnny parked near the front. I turned on the portable radio, already tuned to WZQX, Johnny grabbed a pair of flashlights from the backseat, and we disembarked. The waxing gibbous moon gave us more than enough light to set up our clubhouse on the porch. We had our coffee and Cokes, and the music. I was propped up against the front of the house, while Johnny sat on one of the few remaining railings a few feet away. As he adjusted himself, Johnny accidentally knocked off one of the porches ancient wooden decorations and cursed. “Nihilism is for the young!” I yelled as if response. It was a meaningless non sequitur we often used.
                    We drank coffee and talked, or we sat quietly and listened to the music.
                    Johnny talked about how cool Jennifer was. And I agreed that she did seem really cool. I start to talk about Vicky, but I feel too uncomfortable. It had been two weeks since I came back from the Honor's Summer Program at State University. On the downside, that was where Vicky broke my heart, but on the upside, the English teacher in the program turned me on to Jung. One of the graduate assistants mentioned that the professor had gone through Jungian analysis, and I didn't know what that was, but what he said in class about archetypes, especially the Universal Hero, really fried my brain. For one thing, it made me realize that some of my favorite science fiction writers, like Alexander P. Fish, Seamus McMahon and Fredrick Fendrake, were into Jung. When I got back, I told Johnny about it.
                    “Like in The Overman,” I said to Johnny, as we drank coffee on the dilapidated porch, “I now get more of an idea of why McMahon had used Superman. He's like a modern heroic archetype.”
                    “I'm surprised the comic company that does Superman didn't sue him,” said Johnny.
                    “Maybe they did. It wasn't in print for long. But in that book…”
                    “Sometime, Howard, I think you view the entire world through analogies, like you'd much rather see things in books than in the world. Like there are plenty of archetypes played out everywhere.”
                    “Like..?”
                    "Jimi," said Johnny. Johnny was obsessed with Jimi Hendrix. But I thought about it, and it made sense.
                    “It's like,” he continued, “there are no new bands that seem like they are really new. The Beatles, or Elvis, or Jimi, they kind of made the mold and everyone else is sort of reflections of them.”
                    “What about the Stones?”
                    “Yeah, I think you could argue that they are a type, too. But they kind of set themselves up as the un-Beatles. They were the negative reaction. But, yeah, that's kind of valid.”
                    I thought about that and listened to the radio. It was playing a funny fake ad in which a supermarket's motto was “Drop a Load on the Giant Toad.”
                    “So,” said Johnny slyly, “what happened with you and Vicky?”
                    “What do you mean?” I could feel my face turn red.
                    That was when we noticed the sound. It was coming from below, under the house, like some sort of pulsing. Johnny looked at the radio, and that was when I realized that the pulsing below was in rhythm with the music on the radio.
                    Before I knew what was going on, Johnny had the flashlights and was off the porch, walking quickly around to the side of the house, where I knew, from last week, there was a hole opening into the basement.
                    “You're freaking nuts,” I whispered loudly, but I followed, the pulsing sound in my head. There was Johnny, staring into the hole. When I reached it, the sound hit me in the face, as is it were violently pushed out of the basement through the little portal. It sounded as if there were a giant sound system in there, blasting the radio station at a brutal volume.
                    “I'm going in,” said Johnny, handing me one of the flashlights.
                    Neither of us mentioned the fact that even though Johnny was skinny enough to fit through the hole, it was more than doubtful that I was. And I wasn't sure I wanted to follow him in there, anyway. Sometimes fate decides for us.
                    Johnny started to climb down. The music roared, the bass and guitar were throbbing over tribal tom toms. The singer mumbled something ominous. A voodoo rite, a believer, you do right. The sound was almost monotonous, yet hypnotic. The distorted drone of the instruments blended with the chanting, talking, raspy, raw sound of the voice. And it was so, so loud.
                    I shown my light around the basement and saw it. There, in the middle of the room. It must have been about 7 feet tall. My mind said, no. My eyes took it in, but my brain refused to react. It seemed to be made up of a series of perfect cubes, though of what substance, I couldn't tell. Four cubes stood up on top of each other made the central shaft, while there were other cubes that were stuck on each side at about ¾ up the structure. Its color didn't make sense. It just didn't look like any color I had seen. Any color is bad, I thought for some reason. I swear it sort of glowed. The music pulsated and rolled with almost no melody, building to screaming tones, a primal organic machine, pulling back to grey, build and building. I stood staring, frozen, unable to take it in, unable to make any connection between what I saw and the rest of my world, my life, my reality. I couldn't even ask myself what it was; it had no ties to the waking world. The object had no place in my reality.
                    And Johnny was standing in front of the thing, and its slight glow illuminated him. He reached out his hands to touch it, and I yelled no, but he didn't seem to hear, and something blinked, and there was darkness, and in the blackness, the music fell apart, like a machine that breaks down, floating space above the rhythm, a tearing, the heartbeat, the throb, hit pulse, blood pounding, dark noise, monotonal monochromatic monolithic flatness, darkness. A even though I couldn't hear myself, I could feel in my throat that I was screaming, screaming so hard it hurt, on and on, until my eye stung and my lungs burned and I collapsed in the tall weeds. Screaming until my body gave up.