The Other - GonzoToday

from The Adventures of Brain Man

by Ron Whitehead

I told you I am the oldest of six children, my parents Goliath and Grendel,
my younger brother Muscle Man, my sisters Lamia and the Three Furies,

but I forgot to mention the Other, the shadowy figure, the older brother
I never knew who left home when he was seventeen never to be seen again

and only heard of in news reports, magazine articles or from so and so
saying they saw him dropping into some dark alley or slipping into

a second hand bookstore. He never wrote so we never knew where
he was. He studied for a while, after leaving home, at Oxford on

a couple of scholarships, won all kinds of academic and writing awards
but we didn’t go to any of the presentations because we weren’t invited.

We always found out about them from some other source. We read
the occasional poem in various publications, from round the world,

the librarian would give us and of course we read his deadly strange books.
He was a prolific writer:

On a Mission to Procure Molasses for the U.S. Army, Numinous, From
Marduk to Urantia, Approaching the New Age: A Pilgrimage, Eve &

The Ophidians: The Red Flower, The Plot, The Life of Pierre “Pom Pom”
Revoir: Anarchist, God in Heaven, Oh Melchizedek, My Daughter just

Loves her Vulva: Portraits of Life in a Small Town, Stone Thief, A Legend
in His Own Mind, Wo-Ba Wo-Ba, Monkeys Rule the World, Down and

Out in Louisville, My Daddy the Czar, Myweeni’s Satyricon, The Mosquito
Extermination Commission, Rishikesh, He Lives and its sequel

He Dies, his academically acclaimed work on comedy: Aristotle and
Anassoyes, his award winning one act expressionist play: The Absurd

Turds, the Onan award winning short story: “One Armed Adulterers:
The Masturbatin Blues,” his astonishing book on literary and cultural

criticism titled The Politics of Marriage: Parallelism, Convergence, and
Transmutation in Three Stories by Tolstoy, his work on esoteric

mysticism Mysticus Memoria Rhythmus: Ignis Fatuus? to name a few
and of course the most controversail one, 123 weeks on the New York

Times bestseller list, Guilt Without Sex, oh and who could forget his
internationally acclaimed UR-Feminist fantasy Fellatio With Dirty Men

Made Them Grow Moustaches. I call him Brain Man. Why not? After
everyone started calling me Bone Man I started calling my younger

brother Muscle Man and felt it only natural to call this shadow intellect
Brain Man. I remember walking into his room, when I was a kid, I was

in my I’m gonna be a spy stage and I was taking notes, writing everything
down for future reference. God, the books everywhere and he was just

in high school. Books about the holocaust and the apocalypse, Gibran,
Sufi books, Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Freud and Jung and their followers,

Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso, Ferlinghetti,
and The Beats, Hunter S. Thompson, Hesse and Mann, Hamsun, Ibsen,

Munch, Jacobsen, Strindberg, Meyrink, and all kinds of esoteric mystical
occult stuff: crystal skulls and pyramids, Egypt, Great White Brotherhood,

Atlantis, the Bible, Alchemy, Gnosticism, the Essenes, Kabbalah,
The Golem, Egyptian and Tibetan Books of The Dead, Cayce, Hopis,

all the major and minor religions, meditation, levitation, invisibility, Dylan,
he was consumed by Dylan and Gregorian Chants. God, the sounds

that came out of his attic bedroom: scared the hell out of us kids some
nights. There were lots of posters and pictures on his walls, surreal and

psychedelic stuff, sayings and poems tacked all over, covering the walls
like wallpaper. One poem by Hesse titled “Stages” and one by Wendell

Berry titled “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” and then one
he wrote:

3a.m.

I stare at three prunes on a
white napkin on the brown arm
of an Indian couch against a
brown carpeted floor with three
steps leading up to a white
wall. A tiny bug crawls from
one prune trying to escape my
finger which smashes it. My finger
leaves it exactly where it dies
as proof that it did exist.

See what I mean? What the hell was he getting at? I don’t know. He was
so strange. He had tea bags hanging from his ceiling, a tombstone in the

center of his room, candles all over, a human skull on his desk, a stuffed
raven perched on the back of his chair, incense going all the time. Totally

weird stuff and he never talked. I never heard him say a word. One day
he was gone. We never saw him again. I heard once he decided to become

Essene, read tons of books, may have helped translate some of The Dead
Sea Scrolls, got rid of everything, started fasting and one Easter Sunday,

I read this in the newspaper, he burned down hundreds of acres, said it
was an accident, said he was burning off a plant bed for an herb garden.

No charges were pressed. He disappeared again. I heard he went to
Greece for a couple of years, lived near Delphi, or maybe on the island

of Patmos, traveled all over the East on the Enlightenment Tour to Egypt,
Persia, India, Nepal, Tibet, and back again.

from The Adventures of Brain Man
a work in progress by Ron Whitehead

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