I was married for a time back in 2000. My fiancé was Canadian, and decided to move into my house here in Seattle. Thus she had to go through all the rigmarole of getting a green card to reside in the United States legally. At least one part was easy, in that the physical building that the Immigration and Naturalization Service was housed in was right here in Seattle. It’s a grand old building, but it also contained a detention facility. The jail was on the top floor, if I remember correctly.
I remember going down there to obtain the paperwork for Jen to fill out. I arrived first thing in the morning, and even then there was a huge line. Detainees would yell obscene comments through their barred windows at the women below. When I got inside the door, I could see I had to go past a guard and through a metal detector. I knew better than to have brought my Leatherman tool, or any kind of “weapon” at all. There was a fascinating display on the entryway wall of confiscated weapons. Eventually I was inside, and obtained a huge packet of papers that Jen had to fill out. Now the burden was on her.
She dutifully filled out the paperwork, but we had to make a return visit to the INS building for an in-person interview as a couple. I assume this was done to assess whether ours was a “sham marriage” in order to get a non-American into the country. We were interviewed together by a very nice Asian gentleman. This was all pre 9-11, so there was no hard-ass vibe about the process.
The questions were prosaic, and so bland I barely remember them. I think they were very open ended, like “how did you two meet” and “how long have you known each other.” “Who are your mutual friends?” The mere fact that we were interviewed together shows that it was a low-key affair, as in criminal investigations suspects are NEVER interviewed together, despite what you might have seen on TV.
But then things took a strange and surreal turn. I could tell this kindly man didn’t enjoy broaching this subject, and in fact prefaced his question with the statement “I know this is a strange question, but legally I have to ask it.” This one was directed specifically at Jen.
I suspect, but do not know, that it had to do with the fact that when another country is trying to extradite someone, the easiest legal way for the US to allow the extradition is if the immigrant lied about themselves to the INS. So the interviewer asks Jen, the beautiful, mild-mannered red haired gal, if she’s ever committed genocide…
It was hard for me to suppress laughter at this moment, and Jen answered honestly, that no, she had never committed genocide. Afterwards, the incident became a running joke between us as we would think up potential alternative responses. “What’s the cut-off number between mass murder and genocide?” “Oh, that business in Bosnia? No, we didn’t call it genocide.” “Are you talking about those Vancouver prostitutes?”
Years later Jen became involved in roller derby, and I was slightly disappointed that her roller derby name wasn’t “Jen-o-cide.” Unfortunately that name was already taken…
A few years ago, the INS moved out of the building, and it’s now being used for artist’s workspaces. Last night I went there to attend Bill Beaty’s Weird Science meeting, held at the new location of the Seattle Museum of the Mysteries. A group of us took a tour of the building. We walked out onto a tiled rooftop which functioned as an outdoor “yard” for the INS detainees. On hot days, some detainees would take blobs of roofing tar and write on the brick walls of the building. Some of the graffiti is still there:
An anti INS sentiment:
I left pharmacy for good in 2002. Since then when I meet people I inevitably get asked, usually with some degree of amazement, why I did such a thing. Being a pharmacist is seen by most people as classy, high paying job with a reasonable degree of social status. Why would I give that up?
Usually my responses are vague and perfunctory. My basic theory is there are at least two subjects that people don’t like hearing about; descriptions of dreams, and job discontents. For years I’ve thought of writing down all the little things that added up to my decision to leave pharmacy forever. I thought it might act as sort of a purgative, a way to get rid of the bad memories. But in the end, I decided this would be counter-productive, as I would probably come across as a bitter and disgruntled person.
But there’s one pharmacy story that’s bigger than my own personal discontent, and I think it’s striking enough to write down. It’s a wild story, and if you find yourself skeptical about my claims, I invite you to ask other pharmacists who worked in the South Seattle or Burien areas during the late 80’s and early 90’s for their own accounts. I’m quite confident that you would get a very similar story.
Our story is one of corruption. Corruption that goes on for years, corruption which everyone knows about and about which nothing is done. Our story is about a corrupt doctor. I’ll call him Victor Charlie, as I’d rather avoid becoming embroiled in libel litigation.
First off, I worked for a local pharmacy chain in the late 80’s and early 90’s called Pay ‘n Save. They are no longer in business, as I believe they were bought out by Payless in about 1994. I was promoted from being a staff pharmacist at Westwood Village in West Seattle to head pharmacist at a store in Burien. At the time, I was the youngest head pharmacist in the chain.
I had filled some prescriptions for Doctor Victor Charlie in West Seattle, so I knew a little bit about him. But when I got to Burien, the number of prescriptions I was filling for him probably increased by a factor of five or six, as his office was literally just up the street.
Now at this point, I need to make clear that some of this story is information I gained second-hand, and some is direct and personal. I was told, but did not know for a fact, that VC’s office was also his home, and that his “secretary” was his wife.
VC was not allowed to prescribe controlled substances. This is an indication of the power of the DEA, a Federal agency, which issues licenses to Doctors which allow them to prescribe controlled substances. Even before I worked in Burien, I heard wild tales of why VC’s DEA license had been stripped. Again, the stories were so outrageous that I was skeptical of them. So over time, I began asking as many pharmacists as I could whether the stories were true. Indeed, to a person, they would all describe the same scenario. Evidently, during VC’s heyday, he would simply write three prescriptions for each and every patient that he saw, regardless of their medical condition or lack thereof. Prescription one was for a pint bottle (473ml) of Tussionex. Prescription two was for 100 ten milligram Valium tablets. Prescription three was for 100 Percodan or Percocet tablets. I know this sounds like a complete whopper of a tale, as the abuse pattern is obvious. But as I say, I spoke to numerous pharmacists, and they all told me the same thing, right down the particular drugs and quantities.
Well, the “patients” of Doctor VC had to get their scripts filled somewhere, and so to the local pharmacies they went. I was told by the same pharmacists that VC’s clients would be literally standing in line outside the various pharmacies in South Seattle to get their scripts filled first thing in the morning as the stores opened.
Needless to say, abuse on this scale raises red flags immediately with any moral individual, and soon enough the DEA stripped VC’s license to prescribe controlled substances. Amazingly enough though, he still retained his Washington State Medical License!
By the time I came onto the scene, VC still had an active State License, and was still prescribing drugs. But now he had figured out his Great Loophole. He found a buzz drug which was not a controlled substance! This was the magical Soma, whose generic name is carisoprodol. If you have received spam e-mail mentioning “Soma” and wondered why, now you know. For some odd reason, the DEA did not classify it as a controlled substance, even though it’s a highly euphoric downer. I see by the Wikipedia article on carisoprodol that the legal status has now changed, but again I’m talking about the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.
VC prescribed nothing but Soma. His prescriptions all read “Soma #C i TID” then his signature on the “substitution permitted” line. On ONE occasion as a pharmacist, I saw him write a script for HCTZ for a woman. I flat out told the gal what VC was all about. I suspect she had no idea he was a corrupt scumbag, and blundered into him by chance. I suggested she find another doctor.
At this point our story gets ugly, as the raw and corrupt nature of the situation comes to light. Almost all of VC’s clients were on welfare or DSHS, as it’s known here in Washington. The claim that I heard second hand, but could not verify directly, was that DSHS would not reimburse VC for client visits, and so VC would have to charge his legion of scrotes actual cash money for their office visits. Right there, if true it proved corruption and abuse by ALL his DSHS clients, as a genuine and legitimate welfare client wouldn’t pay out of pocket for an office visit.
But the deal was, DSHS would reimburse the pharmacies for the DRUGS THEMSELVES! And here I will publicly admit my shame in participating in this corruption. As a pharmacist, I had a legal right to refuse to fill VC’s scripts. But I didn’t. Why not? Because I had a strong intuition that If I did so, VC would complain to the higher-ups at Pay ‘n Save, and that Pay ‘n Save wouldn’t back me up.
Virtually ALL of VC’s clients were on DSHS. The taxpayers of Washington State were being ripped off for thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars each year, just so the clients of VC could get high. In just the 2 years or so I worked at the Burien location, I must have dispensed 100,000 hits of generic Soma from VC, all billed to DSHS and the taxpayers of Washington.
As a weird aside, all of this was occurring before the World Wide Web. VC had hundreds of clients, seemingly all the human garbage of South King County on his Rolodex. It continuously amazed me how sheer word-of-mouth power was able to connect so many individuals into a gigantic drug-scrote network.
For years after I left pharmacy, I couldn’t even read stories on the Internet about new drugs or medical treatments. It brought back too much negative emotional baggage. I’m mostly over that now, but from time to time, you hear about some horrific human tragedy that occurs because Washington DSHS dropped the ball. Well, I’m here to tell you that DSHS knew perfectly well about the egregious corruption of VC which went on for YEARS, and did nothing about it. And the Washington Board of Medicine was also to blame, as they too did NOTHING. Both of them were taxpayer-funded agencies of flaccid, impotent, castrated eunuchs.
I left Pay ‘n Save in 1992 to go on the road as a sideshow performer. I did that until 1994 when I became a pharmacist again. By this time Pay ‘n Save had been bought out and I was employed elsewhere. Sometime in 1994 or 1995 I received a memo in the interoffice mail that VC’s Washington State Medical License had finally been stripped! As a gag, I called him up and asked him about it. I asked him what to do if I got one of his prescriptions. He claimed he was fighting his battle in court, and that his prescriptions were still valid…
Using the power of the Internet, this afternoon I googled VC’s name and discovered that he continued to prescribe Soma and another drug called Nubain after the board had stripped his license! Indeed, according to court documents, his “clinic” was adjacent to his house. The police set up a sting operation, and VC’s property was seized when drugs were found in his residence and “clinic.” You would think that this would shut the guy down for good, but amazingly enough, he and his wife beat the asset forfeiture rap in court!
The cynicism I have about certain aspects of the medical establishment and the abuse of the welfare system is still hard to shuck. When I read that Michael Jackson’s doctor had not been stripped of his California Medical license even after Jackson’s autopsy verdict came back as homicide, I wasn’t really that surprised…
After walking down Alki beach this evening, I went to 7-11 to buy some diet pop. Sitting in the parking lot was a young man digging something out of the sole of his bare foot. As I exited the store, I saw he had moved under a floodlight. I pulled out my 3D Maglite from my truck and asked if he needed more light. He said thanks, but asked if I had a knife. As I handed him my Leatherman Core and turned on my flashlight, I could see he had been digging at his skin with a 1cc syringe. He started digging at his sole with the knife blade on the Leatherman tool.
As I illuminated his foot, he was startled by the sound of some woman calling to him. He said he had to leave immediately or else his girlfriend would abandon him there. He got up and ran toward her and her car, evidently with a glass shard still embedded in his foot. Thoughtfully, he suggested I carefully clean off my knife…
It’s presently drying after an extended bath in 35% hydrogen peroxide.
When I was a child I was brought up as a Lutheran. My father was Irish, and had been put through a Catholic grade school which I gather he really hated. He became an atheist, but he didn’t really talk to me about it. My mother, brother, and maternal grandmother were Lutherans, and so I went along with their program by default. This was the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, so the Sunday school programs were rather liberal. Most of what we did involved studying various workbooks, and not so much reading the Bible itself. As an adult I actually regret this, as when I encounter allusions to the Bible in art or literature, I usually have to go look it up to understand what’s going on!
Sometime in the summer of 1976 or 1977 I went to the county fair and encountered a Christian booth that was giving away Jack T. Chick tracts. I was immediately taken by what I was seeing. I hadn’t really read comic books as a child, with the exception of MAD magazine, which is not really a comic book anyway. I probably read Archie or Richie Rich a handful of times.
Chick’s version of Christianity was vastly more hardcore than the mild-mannered Lutheran religion that I had been exposed to. Yet it was so much more emotionally compelling than what I was exposed to in Sunday school that I read every Jack T. Chick tract I could get my hands on! At one point I think I mail ordered a huge compilation pack that included most or all of the issues that were in print at the time.
One tract in particular stuck out: Big Daddy. This was a rather infamous creationist manifesto, a direct and ruthless attack on the theory of evolution by natural selection. My religious thinking was beginning to come to a head with me sometime in about my junior year of high school. I remember taking a biology class that included a section on evolution, and the instructor had to spend the first part of the class simply addressing the negative creationist feedback he had received over the years.
But several things were in my favor, as far as the search for the truth goes. One was that the biology class set things out in an orderly progression, where one piece of evidence logically flowed to another piece of evidence. In contrast, Chick’s manifesto was a scattershot hodge-podge of criticisms, not a logically coherent theory.
I remember having a sort of teenage epiphany walking home to lunch one day with my friend John. I was talking about evolution and the biology class. John had known me since early grade school and was rather shocked to hear me express doubts about evolution.
“Matt, you’re a scientific kind of guy, what are you doing believing in all this creationist nonsense?’
Indeed, one of the saving graces of this period was that I had discovered the non-fiction books of Isaac Asimov. I don’t know what essay it was, but I had a genuine epiphany when I discovered Asimov’s treatment of the second law of thermodynamics. Asimov pointed out the great flaw in the creationist’s argument regarding the second law; the earth is not a closed system, and the second law only applies to closed systems. At this point I knew that Chick was full of shit, but the implications were deeper still, and this is why this episode rose to the level of epiphany for me.
The family I grew up in never “joshed” each other, or “told stories” or even “pulled your leg.” If this sounds rather emotionally rigid, you would be right. Obviously my friends didn’t adhere to this same kind of standard, and I believe the development of my “bullshit detector” was rather stunted. Even as an adult, I look back with sadness at how many times people have lied to me and gotten away with it, at least for a time. Again, I’m talking about the intuitive level, not the above board critical thinking level. I believe that critical thinking is like typing, it’s not a skill that one is naturally born with, it’s something you have to work at and develop.
So believe it or not, having a huge emotional infatuation with the tracts of Jack T. Chick then realizing that he was totally full of shit about evolution, made a huge impact on me. How could there be people in this world who spent their entire lives spouting nonsense and lies? How could there be people in this world who wouldn’t change their beliefs when exposed to strong evidence or logical argument?
Obviously the older I got, the more I realized that the world is absolutely chock full of liars, con men, frauds, and bullshiters of every kind!
I became a complete atheist by reading a rather odd pair of books. The first was the Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. Bierce’s book was an anthology of biting aphorisms, often quite blasphemous. But one theme that was constant in his book was that there are, and have been, many religions in the history of humankind, each of them believing itself to be the One True Religion. Simple logic dictates that they can’t all be right, and in fact most of them must be wrong because they all contradict each other. This is a simple concept, but it made a big impact on me.
Eventually I read Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell. This was the first time I learned that various logical arguments had been proposed for the existence of God. The argument from first cause, the argument from design, etc. Russell systematically demonstrated that all of these arguments are fallacious. Russell’s book was also a valuable exposure to the nature of logic expressed in a linguistic fashion as opposed to the mathematical proofs of geometry that I was familiar with.
So by the time I started college in 1980, Jack T. Chick was an embarrassing episode in my mental development, kind of like admitting you liked some really bad music for a certain time period…
Only recently did I even start thinking about Chick again as a result of becoming interested in “underground” comics in general. I became a fan quite late in the game, largely as a result of Denny Eichhorn giving me a whole set of his Real Stuff comics, and seeing the documentary Crumb. Just a few years ago, Fantagraphics opened a retail store in Georgetown, which is literally just over the hill from where I live. Through Fantagraphics I was reacquainted with Jim Blanchard, an amazing cartoonist and graphic artist in his own right. I had actually met Blanchard in the late 1980’s when I came into a Kinko’s that he was working at. I allowed him to keep some copies of some photographic portraits I brought in. He eventually re-drew and incorporated some of them into his graphic compilations.
During Super Bowl Sunday, 2010, Jim was kind enough to loan me a rare parody-documentary tract called “The Imp” which was a rather scathing criticism of Chick. Unknown to me, during the 1980’s Chick had become associated with other individuals with beliefs just as far-out as his, and he integrated their stories into his own tracts. Blanchard also gave me a copy of a fantastic video documentary on Chick that included interviews with at least two people I was familiar with.
Chick is an enigma; obviously he’s not in the same aesthetic niche as Crumb, Daniel Clowes, Peter Bagge, or any other “underground” comic artist. You won’t find his tracts for sale at Fantagraphics, nor even many Christian bookstores. According to the documentary, Canada considers Chick’s comics “Hate Literature!”
I’m sure I’m not alone in being one of those people who was affected in some weird and possibly profound way by Jack T. Chick. I think I’ll start asking people for their own stories…
Ashleigh Talbot has put together a lavish and extensive set of webpages regarding her time spent at SCUD. She had the presence of mind to save a great deal of ephemera, which undoubtedly helped to spark memories which would have otherwise been forgotten. She took photographs herself, and was surrounded by professional or semi-professional photographers. SCUD was most certainly a social and artistic cornerstone of the Seattle “underground” during its time on earth. I spent a bit of time at SCUD, and some of Ashleigh’s stories inspired me to write down what I remember.
Unlike Ashleigh, I didn’t have the presence of mind to take photographs or retain other kinds of ephemera about SCUD. So I’m running strictly on memory here, which can be fallible.
First off, I moved to Seattle from Montana in 1987. It was immediately obvious to me that just being a pharmacist was not emotionally satisfying in and of itself. At the time, I was deeply inspired by the books published by RE/Search, which suggested that intensive investigation into unusual topics was intrinsically cool. I had already accumulated a large database of forensic literature regarding autoerotic asphyxia, and I began to buy books on forensic science, which were often rather expensive. So at the time, I thought of myself as a researcher and not a creator. I was also fascinated with counterfeit currency, and began to buy books on the topic. This was a result of my obsession with the movie To Live and Die in LA.
Soon after arriving in Seattle, I discovered COCA, the Center on Contemporary Arts. Almost all of the content appealed to me, and even as a pharmacist, I felt very much at ease with what was obviously the best of Seattle’s underground artistic counterculture.
Not long after I arrived in Seattle I began to hang out at a long-gone bar on Capitol Hill called Squid Row. One night a long haired man about my age came in the bar with a metallic suitcase, much like the one seen in To Live and Die in LA. I immediately figured this guy must be cool, based on this characteristic alone. Soon enough he opened his briefcase, and inside were copies of his fanzine, hot off the Kinko’s presses. This was Tim “Zamora” Cridland, and his ‘zine was called Off the Deep End. Although I had done a great deal of photocopying before coming to Seattle, I had never seen a true fanzine before. I remember thumbing through it, and coming upon a morbid cartoon; an illustration of the JFK assassination with the caption “The three ballots that elected Lyndon Johnson.” This really knocked my socks off, and thus began a long term friendship with Tim Cridland.
Cridland knew Mike Hoy of Loompanics. At the time, I was totally unfamiliar with Loompanics, though I was familiar with one of its rivals, Paladin Press, having ordered Get Even several years before. I think I was at a COCA event, possibly “Weapons of WWIV” when I was approached by Tim who told me that Mike Hoy was interested in having me write an essay about autoerotic asphyxia for Loompanics. Hoy learned of my interest in this arcane subject through Tim. At the time, I was hugely flattered. I was going to be paid $100 for this essay! I would be a published author!
I set about writing the article, and eventually submitted it to Hoy. It ran in the 1989 main catalog and was later included in a compilation of essays published as a book entitled Loompanics Greatest Hits. Included in the essay were two illustrations by an artist I was unfamiliar with. At the time the only “signature” of the artist was an equilateral triangle roughly bisected by a line.
I think I was at the Rebar when I finally met the artist, Ashleigh Talbot. I think she approached me and introduced herself. Being that her illustrations were so graphically morbid, I think I expected her to be dour and negative; perhaps she sacrificed chickens in her spare time… But she was nothing like that at all, being ebullient and positive. She seemed to genuinely understand the fascination with atypical death and sexual paraphilia.
I remember being at the SCUD party for the Modern Primitives show. I think as a COCA member I received an official invitation. Honestly I don’t remember too much about the party, except the entrance of ManWoman, whom I had read about in the RE/Search books.
I felt like a groupie as I called out to him as he entered… I remember going ga-ga over meeting Andrea Juno, whom I respected as a co-creator of the RE/Search books, and because she was very good looking. I corresponded with her a bit afterwards, but nothing really came of it. I got this vibe that over time she became something of a man-hater, but I could be wrong about this.
Years later, when I was on the sideshow, I had the pleasure of visiting V. Vale at the RE/Search offices. Andrea was still in San Francisco at the time, and still with RE/Search, but I gathered that things were beginning to break down. V. Vale was the perfect host with me, however, and he called Andrea on the telephone. Evidently she was upstairs at the time. V. Vale told her I was in the office, and invited her to come down and say hello. Apparently she couldn’t be bothered, and refused to leave her post. Awkward… I remember V. Vale casually opening an office drawer which revealed a large caliber short barreled revolver. I thought that was pretty cool; better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it…
I attended the COCA opening of the Modern Primitives show and took photographs. I could tell that the Modern Primitives “scene” was going to be big, and indeed it became so. But I also noticed that most of the participants were young, white, and mostly middle class. It occurred to me that there was a whole other set of tattooed people who had not received the kind of lavish artistic attention that the “Modern Primitives” had; convicts. I formulated a fantasy of creating a book documenting prisoners and their tattoos. The state prison at Monroe wasn’t too far away, and even Walla Walla wasn’t very far either. I knew that good photography was critical to the project. When I was in college, I had been in a band called Sports and Science. We enlisted an amateur photographer’s help in taking promo shots of our band for posters. It turned into an absolute nightmare, as he was developing his own photos, and time was quickly running out. At the VERY last minute, he delivered his still-wet enlargements, literally floating in a bucket of water…
I didn’t want to farm out the photography, so I purchased a Canon AV-1 camera and a macro lens. I began to take close up photos. I also got very lucky, as I found a tattoo artist named Roni Falgout who had made her own tattoo gun! I invited her to a party at my apartment and took photos of her equipment, and of her tattooing a lime. I could tell that macro photography was challenging, and at the time I didn’t even have a tripod.
But as it happened by 1991 I had joined the sideshow, and my entire life began to change in huge ways. I was no longer a spectator or fan of the underground Seattle scene, but an actual participant! Our sword swallower Paul Lawrence, or “Slug” as he was known at the time, had but one tattoo on his body. He decided that he wanted to be completely tattooed, in the tradition of the great Omi, but he knew that he didn’t have the money to pay a professional to completely tattoo his whole body. Being that we were on the road at the time, it occurred to him that if he had the equipment, he could probably work on his project during his off-hours on the road. Who would do the actual tattooing? I’m not sure what his plan was…
At the time, there was no World Wide Web as we know it today, and my understanding is that professional tattoo equipment was only being sold to “established” tattoo artists. I suggested to Slug that perhaps I could build an improvised gun, much like Roni Falgout’s machine. I remember going to a Goodwill store in Burien and buying about 8 small motorized appliances, in hopes of finding a suitable motor that could power a tattoo gun.
But yet again, it was another project that never quite got finished, as thankfully Ashleigh stepped in to help out Slug. This is why I’m included in the photograph posted on her site; I wanted to follow up on Slug’s crazy project, and was more than happy to see someone competent like Ashleigh doing the tattooing, and with professional equipment.
Ashleigh was a huge supporter of the sideshow, and created one of the more enduring illustrations of the original group. I remember being in her studio and seeing the artwork for the very first time. It was about 95% completed, with some crosshatching missing in a corner. It was a VERY well done illustration, and I was gonzo over the fact that it would be used as promotional material for posters and t-shirts.
As it happened, Jim Rose was also in attendance, and was also smitten with the image. He was a chronic pothead, but this evening he seemed to be more than several tokes over the line. At one point he dreamily remarked “I just want to gaaaaazze at it….” This became a catch phrase for us for a while there. Again, Ashleigh had to remind Jim that the illustration wasn’t finished. But somehow, Jim either didn’t listen, didn’t care, or was just too stoned to remember, and he took the artwork before Ashleigh had a chance to finish it.
The artwork began to show up on posters and t-shirts. At first it was kind of funny; a testament to Jim’s stoned fuck-up in not listening to Ashleigh. But over time it became less funny, and eventually it really illustrated how Rose treated other human beings. The missing crosshatching reflected on the artist, not on Jim Rose, so Rose could care less. The design came to be reproduced again and again, with Rose never stepping in to allow the final and correct design to be reproduced. Rose was a great promoter, but was a total shit as a human being.
Ashleigh included a great illustrated story in her SCUD history about the man who wanted to get inside the building, but was thwarted by the mail man. During the time I was on the sideshow, I began to spend more time at SCUD, specifically hanging out with Ashleigh. She was completely nocturnal, so it would always be a nighttime visit. SCUD didn’t have an apartment style buzzer system, and cell phones weren’t in widespread use back then. You either yelled at the building, or threw rocks or pennies at the window. I took a careful look at the door, and decided that I could simply slim Jim the thing. I got permission from Ashleigh to enter the building this way, and kept the slim Jim in my car. I can’t remember clearly, but I may have ended up hiding the slim Jim near the door of the building.
I met Jim Hogshire through Tim Cridland, and discovered that Hogshire spent a great deal of time at SCUD, hanging out with Ashleigh. I remember seeing Hogshire at SCUD one night with a small briefcase full of tablets and capsules. I seem to remember seeing Dilantin capsules. This confused me, as Dilantin was not something that would get you high, nor did Hogshire have epilepsy, as I recall. He just had an overwhelming fetish for pharmaceuticals…
In 1992 I purchased an oxy-acetylene torch set-up, but had no shop with which to work in. Thankfully I was introduced to Louie Raffloer, who had his own blacksmith shop not far away from SCUD. I would drop by there from time to time, to socialize with Louie and learn about metal work. I remember trading Louie a Mossberg shotgun for a Milwaukee angle grinder. Below Louie’s shop was a band practice room, and from time to time, you would see members of Pearl Jam or Soundgarden coming out of the dingy basement and into the equally grungy alleyway…
I remember attending a big target shooting party with Louie, Jim Hogshire, and a number of other folks back in about 1996. Louie brought a bunch of spray paint cans which he had bought on sale for a buck apiece at one of the big chain hardware stores. We would have a campfire burning beside the paint can, and when hit with a bullet, the can would explode like something you see on MythBusters. I seem to remember posing for a photograph with Louie and Jim Hogshire. I think Hogshire had his notorious M-1 carbine and I held a Ruger Mini-14 with a black synthetic folding stock. I never did see that developed photo….
Weirdly, Hogshire and I had been to one of the periodic gun shows held in Puyallup previous to this adventure. Someone was selling home-made thermite incendiary devices for $20! This was the only time I saw anything like this for sale there. Hogshire and I each bought one. I took mine to Louie’s target shooting party and lit the fuse. It was a dud! What a rip-off!
Later, when Hogshire was busted for poppy possession at his apartment, the cops found HIS thermite device, and the SPD had to call in an additional bomb squad!
I think I met Clark Humphrey at SCUD, at one of Ashleigh’s late-night get-togethers. Over time, I would read his essays on Seattle, popular culture, and many other topics, but it took me a long time to really realize how much attention and research went into his work. His books Loser and Vanishing Seattle are superb histories of the transient nature of Seattle culture.
Although Steve Fisk was a SCUD participant, I really only got to know him through our mutual friend Kim Thayil, whom I had met on Lollapalooza in the summer of 1992. Honestly, I didn’t really understand or appreciate Fisk’s contribution to the Seattle music scene at the time. I remember speaking to him about Negativland and their album U2. Steve was kind enough to give me a cassette of that recording. Again, at the time I had little appreciation of exactly how rare or exotic such a recording was. I’m pretty sure I still have that tape!
All the time I spent at SCUD I was completely oblivious to Ben McMillan and Gruntruck! As lame as this sounds, I was introduced to Gruntruck by watching Beavis and Butthead! It was only after SCUD was all gone that I happened to run into Ben in a magazine store on Broadway on Capitol Hill. He was most polite, and I had no idea at the time that he had significant health problems. I ran into him once or twice more on Broadway, then I learned that he had died!
The mummified cat brought back memories too… At the time, I knew enough about forensic science in general and taphonomy in particular to know that mummification takes place only when a body is in a warm and dry place for a long time. I had read enough about the Green River Killer case and the work of Donald Reay and Clyde Snow to know that mummification is highly unlikely in an environment like the Pacific Northwest. Thus I was always a tad skeptical that the “mummy” wasn’t a gaff, and that Ashleigh and the SCUD people weren’t Rickrolling the marks with the “mummy” story.
But I believe Ashleigh, and I believe the feline mummy was the real deal. I suspect it died indoors, perhaps in a furnace room, or during a hot and dry Seattle summer.
All in all, SCUD was a trip, even though I was there mostly just as fan or hanger-on. For me it was one of those things in life that you take for granted, and don’t realize its value until it’s gone.
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