JOHN BARNLY: a memory

I was scrolling through the local news on my phone and I found the death of John Barnly. He was discovered in a ditch off of Hwy 41 and his false leg was missing.

Stroll gentle enough through the living graves of my memory, you will find the afternoon of John Barnly and Mary Bell. John Barnly was the first of many dealers I once knew, I met him in one of countless disassociative fugues decades back while I was taking an extended lunch in the subterranean bar called Skeleton Closet. I was staring at myself staring into the erotic depths of my golden pilsner when John Barnly staggered in like a survivor from an interstate apocalypse, the mythic wreckage of his physique redolent of engine oil, antifreeze, freshly mowed grass, the peeling prosthesis of his right leg whispering ancient ballads of manikin massacres. His hand sought and grasped my shoulder like the head of a reborn boy he wanted to keep underwater. I crawled back into my body and took his claw off my shoulder and turned to behold the psychotic patina of his gaze as he without pretext told me tales of a seal-killing, drug-smuggling stuntmen and ultimately the motorcycle murder of Jerry Garcia which he claimed lonely credit. He went on to confess an hour later while he wore a White Russian mustache that it was Garcia’s ghost who stole his missing leg which was severed at the site of the tragedy. Eventually he said, “Karl, give me a ride home.”

My name wasn’t Karl. I did have an uncle Karl, he so he was close, and for this intimacy of near-identity I gave him a ride home. He lived in Sunset Park, close to the ports, in a half-renovated Victorian.  His wife, Mary Bell, was waiting on the front porch, her face a lupine mask of ravenous paranoia.   

“Mary Bell, this is Karl, you remember I was telling you about him? The coffin builder?”

Mary Bell’s face then morphed into the mask of a medieval inquisitor for a second before cracking open to reveal the mask of a wife wise with successful murder. Mary Bell had many masks she shared with strangers, with friends, family, crackdealers, animals both domesticated and feral, every creature on the planet unfortunate to wander into the fearsome crater of her gaze. 

“Is that a fact,” she said, not taking her eyes off me. 

“Well, it was a fact, I haven’t built one in a while, not since my brother died.”

“A real tragedy, I’m sure,” she said giving me a gorgeous gorgonic grimace which made my dick stir, it’s true.  

In their spacious, sparsely furnished living room, a silver tray of lines of ground oxycontins were before me. These were transplanted diplomats from Burlington Vermont, the land of the Martyr, Bernie. I snorted several lines and listened to their tragic tales of hepititus C, casual manslaughter, rape by long lost Aunts with five limbs, smoking crack with Colin Powell at a spanking party, a repeat of the Garcia assassination and I believed their every last syllabastards. 

“So tell me about the tragedy,” Mary Bell said, clearing her nostrils with Wild Irish Rose. 

“Where to begin,” I said and out spilled my own monstrous litanies, of friends and relatives whose corpses I built a humble castle for, I spoke of my childhood friends Brian and Jeremy who snorted flaxx and fed on each other’s faces before being claimed by the river, aunt Margaret, who blew her brains out on the wedding portrait of her brother, of Tom Farmer, who manage to behead himself with a mailbox, of my cousin Michael Preston who was raped to death by a poltergeist, of my other cousin Nicole Summers who jumped out of a helicopter for reasons known only to her and the iguana she believed was the reincarnation of Ted Bundy, all this sewage came out in remorseless torrents, as John Barnly and Mary Bell nodded with tearful sympathy as we snorted line after line of crushed oxycontins.

Ah, John Barnly, I remember driving you and Mary Bell to our beloved Bungalow on Nun Street, meeting Emma for the first time in 2006, it was the year she would turn 40 and she walked out the front door braless, wearing a red v-neck shirt and you turned to me and told me she had the greatest tits on earth, you said this in front of your wife who was smiling because she realized I wasn’t a psychopath, but a flesh and blood dude with a wife and a house and above all, compassion.

John Barnly, I introduced you to a physical therapist, in the strip mall where the AA chapel and the Jesus freak coffee shop was, I remember him weeping when beholding your ragged prosthesis, he took a mold of your stump and three days later, you had a new hydrolic leg, free of charge, I remember you walking proudly in our living room with smooth soft grace and Emma later told me this was the origin of my deranged infatuation.   

I remember you John Barnly for you were my true father, my father of narcotic addiction, a father who taught me a terrible language of false love, of nameless bestial need for bliss everlasting, your lessons hang eternal in ashen scrawl in this kitchen right now, right here, you were my true father, who was an addict himself yet held no fascination for me, you held fascination for me to the last until Emma gave me my first concussion. I see now past the temple scrawl, John Barnly I see the last memory of you wielding an iphone instead of a payphone, as he calls me up and does not ask me to lend him my car, no, these are the last words of a last man.

“CHRIS, LISTEN TO ME, I’M GOING TO HAVE YOU PICK ME UP BEHIND THE FERTILIZER PALLETS BEHIND WALMART, OKAY, BYE, OH, BY THE WAY, I WANT A TREE WITH A BIRD ON IT THAT SINGS” Burble beep beep.

I drive out to the Walmart on Market Street in demonic nostalgia, I see the spectral stain of his silhouette staggering out of the pallets gesticulating wildly to me in the elite language of air traffic controllers.

“IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME BROTHER! He screams. John Barnly is not deaf, he needs to scream because he believes his words are eaten alive by what he calls the “syllabastards,” a species of parasites that prey on his words, and his words alone.

When he gets in I ask him where the syllabastards spring from, their origin, their native pathology. He tells me “They are the soul spores from an Inuit I ran over in Alberta, never looked back, never lost control.”

I give him a ride near my new home, to Gore’s Row, an alley off of Dock Street, this alley is the Valhalla of crackheads, and it still thrives to this day. John Barnly gets out and grasps my shoulder like a reborn boy again and says unto me, “Remember, Chris, I want a memory with a view.”

Those last words were seven years ago.

On the night of his murder John Barnly was in an SUV full of psychos, he was convinced under the drunken pretense he was going to sell 400 hundred percecets he had smuggled from Vermont to a Patriarch in Kinston County for 4500 dollars, they took him down a gravel driveway in total darkness, and John thought of his daughter for the first time in three years and began to tremble at her beauty, a light scorching the roof of his skull, the stalks of his eyes, a bio-mnemonic symptom of approaching death, John Barnly, secret assassin of Jerry Garcia, I see the survival terror in your heart, as you roll out the door at 49 mph losing the great leg I conjured for you, see you hopping one-legged through the nocturnal cabbage fields of North Carolina, your daughter’s face replacing the clear cosmos above you, see you finally a true father at last.