Trading Fours Along the Yackingitup
“All things change, nothing is extinguished. . . There is nothing in the whole world which is permanent. Everything flows onward; all things are brought into being with a changing nature; the ages themselves glide by in constant movement.” — Ovid
Ed McClanahan (October 5, 1932 — November 27, 2021)
Prefix:
I wrote the following in September/October but mostly in November of 2021. Initially intended as an interview that Ed readily agreed, my records reveal, on September 28th to conduct with me, and we had started the process, but his physicality took a quick decline in October, and the project altered course to be “creative journalism”: a profile.
Ed was alive, I’d just seen him on the sixth of the month of November, and I had no intention of writing a eulogy. I was hoping to compose instead a place-holder, something to bolster spirits while his body might make a return to the stage. Sadly (for the rest of us), the curtain closed on Ed’s earthly form and Captain Kentucky done departed on November 27th, so this bunch of fours traded becomes a well-wishing, a waving fare-thee-well as Ed goes “westing,” a voyage not a finality, a verb: a journey to where time becomes space.
There’s this room. It’s got four walls (as rooms often do, which some scholars have, in fact, previously noted) and two facing mirrors on two of the four walls (not necessarily a standard feature of the common four-walled-room). Somehow these two mirrors on opposite two walls (and the reflections between them) serve as portals to alternate realities within the timeline. Entering one, I end up in Lexington, Kentucky circa late 1990s, and writer Gurney Norman & I are visiting writer Ed McClanahan at his home on Walton Avenue.
Walking “The Gurn” (as he is known in some circles, or at least, that’s how Ed more often than not refers to him) back to his car, his expression alters from the previous, genial visit with Ed and The Gurn tells me: “Ya know, JT? You and I disagree on pretty much everything there is to disagree.”
Now, I don’t know why Gurney is finding me so distasteful in this moment. I mean, I had him as a teacher in the gay old 90s, and as best as I can recall I got an A in his writing class. He did call me a “hipster” during a meeting in his office. But that was circa 1995–6, back when the term hipster had yet to take on its 21st century insinuation, a kind of diminishing inference of empty-headed, hair-hopping pomposity. Gurney, who hung with the psychedelic Merry Pranksters in his California years, meant the word then more in its original, Beat context/definition, reflecting that someone — in an underground or alternative (if not just plain subversive) manner — invests in recognizing the good stuff and knowing where to find it.
These rooms and mirrors and walking & talking with The Gurn were, actually, a dream I had recently. Emphasis on alternate/timeline realities. Gurney may in fact disagree with me on pretty much all there is to disagree, but you’d have to ask him about the veracity of that yourself. Furthermore, I ain’t writing about him. I mean, I just did (write about him, both alternate and the reality I take to be vaguely real or at least standard issue as of present writing). My subject, if I got one, is: talking with Ed.
When it gets down to Ed McClanahan & me talking, the image I receive in my brain-pan is comix-style word balloons over-lapping each other and growing kudzu-like, obscuring the heads of, us, the talkers. In fact, if I were to make a comic book about us conversating, that’s exactly how I’d depict the occasion of us. We are both prone (and prod each other to) what I term “digressionary fables.” One story or anecdote begs another story and sometimes whatever story is first getting told gets lost in all the tributaries and estuaries of conversation of flowing waters along the banks of Yackingitup River.
I’ve been talking these guys (Gurney and Ed), separately, together, and except to stick the label of writer upon each of them, but I ain’t exactly delineated them to/for the uninitiated. Like This Reporter, Gurney Norman and Ed McClanahan are both native Kentuckians, with a gap of about forty years between my age and their ages (84 & 89, respectively, as of this writing, in the year of Our Buck Rogers, 2021). However, California has as much to do with these two writers as Kentucky roots. Both received the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University in the 1960s (as did three other of their Kentucky contemporaries: Wendell Berry, James Baker Hall, and Bobbie Ann Mason (I refuse to call them the “Fab Five” as some do, but there it is, I just did: too late) & with the right timing in the right placing of the right decade, both Ed & The Gurn ended up in circles that included author and a primary, uncontested engineer of the psychedelic revolution in the guise of one Ken Kesey, Ed known as “Captain Kentucky,” among the Merry Pranksters, Kesey’s proto-hippie gang of creative, acid-tripping miscreants and misbehavers.
In 1971, Gurney would serialize his first novel in the pages of the influential countercultural rag, Whole Earth Catalog aka The Last Whole Earth Catalog (created and helmed by fellow Prankster, Stewart Brand (more about him, later)). Ed’s first novel Natural Man did not appear until 1983, but in the meantime and in between time, he published well-received articles in magazines such as Esquire, Playboy, and Rolling Stone, back when articles in such publications paid well and circulated widely. Once Ed’s first novel came out, it was followed by more books of his creative nonfiction and short fiction, creating in the 1980s and 90s the reputation and body of works he is known for today. Ed and Gurney were inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame in 2019 and both are still writing and publishing. In fact, Ed managed in 2020, in the year of the pandemic, to publish not just one but two new books (and to have his first ever exhibition as a visual art (and, once again: more on that later)). Gurney himself published a new book of stories, Allegiance, in 2020, and both Ed and Gurney feature prominently in Child of Light, a biography of their mutual friend, writer Robert Stone, by Madison Smartt Bell, also published in 2020.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, Ed McClanahan and I are at the University of Kentucky’s radio station, WUKY ( not a ranch, actually, and not to be confused with its stepsibling run by students/volunteers, WRFL, of which This Reporter speaks to you now, as an alum/former on-air disc jockey, class of 1994–2004). It’s the dawning years of the 21st century (2002, to be exacting) & we, along with a couple of other performers/poets/writers, are guests of the Curtains at 8 arts program to promote a single event, “Poetry in the Park,” in Lexington. A big, honking thing (the event not the station’s studio) that my pal Troy Teegarden is organizing with a bucket-load of performers putting on a talent show under the sun in the greater garden district of Fayette county, or at least: Woodland Park.
While I’m on task to recite the written word, I’ve always been a doodler of cartoons/maker o’ comix, so besides whatever folio of verse in my satchel, I also got with me a sketchbook of drawings. Ed takes a look with at least one of his eyes at my sketchbook and gets a good giggle at an image depicting a cartoony figure with a third eye. Or: previously with that extra oracular/ocular device, as his forehead (the guy on the page, not Ed) sports a bloody absence, with the caption: My third eye done tore loose and got away from me. Something like that. Either way, there’s a drawing and Ed’s laughing at the occasion of it. He continues to remember the cartoon beyond recall of my name, but when we meet years later (again) as Ed & JT, he brings that third eye (or absence of one) back up to me again.
As we slip from the present tense to now, I had already met (intersecting at radio stations notwithstanding) Ed as writer — if not as a pal or collaborator — via the conduit of having reading his books and miscellaneous articles in the local press penned or at least typed by the guy and having attended readings in Lexington at which he performed, from the 1990s onward. Allow me to quote Ed on the evolution of our connection (and even a bit on his evolution of me dragging him into exhibiting his own visual art, old drawings by him from the mid-1960s, made by Ed in La Honda, which miraculously survived to present day, known as the McClanahands):
“In 2017, I was having lunch one day with my friend and Lexington neighbor Johnny Lackey, an accomplished landscape painter, and the subject of graphic novels came up somehow. On a passing impulse, I told Johnny about my hoary old idea, and casually added, ‘So if you know anybody … ‘
‘Yeah, I do,’ he said. ‘You should try J.T. Dockery.’
This Dockery person — actually, we had met once, years before, but we didn’t really know each other at all — this J.T. Dockery, it developed, had recently shown his work at Institute 193, a small (but ever so discriminating!) downtown Lexington gallery, and to accompany the show, Phillip March Jones, the gallery’s curator-at-large, had published Despair Vol.1, an oversized assortment of his artist’s cartoonage. I got my hands on a copy of it somehow, and was floored anew on every page. Everything I saw was dark and edgy and smart and highly literate, by turns charming and appalling, grim and winsome, all of that and funny as billy hell besides. […] I’d lucked out: This was my guy all right, this spelunker in the inky darkness with the Kafkaesque sensibilities. I gave him a call at the soonest opportunity (an eastern Kentucky native, he lived then in London, KY, about sixty miles south of Lexington) and told him what I had in mind, and he agreed to look at the story. I sent it to him, he liked it, and we immediately sealed the deal.
Two or three months later, J.T. showed me a few panels of the work in progress (I’d call it a graphic novella, but J.T. insists that he does comix, not graphix), and when I saw again his meticulous shading and lettering, and the keen attention he was paying to the details and the language of the story, I was agog with admiration and delight. At the time, I was working on a memoir called Not Even Immortality Lasts Forever, and in the spring of 2019, J.T. and I hit the finish line more or less simultaneously. With my book safely off to the publisher, we made an afternoon appointment to show J.T.’s Juanita to a couple of editors at the University Press of Kentucky, and agreed to meet for lunch beforehand — which would also be my first look at the finished comic book. Predictably, I liked it so much it’s a wonder I just didn’t go ahead and eat it for lunch. And when we schlepped it across town and showed it to the UPK editors, they found it so tasty they wouldn’t even let J.T. take it home with him. Two weeks later, we had a contract.
With both books set for publication at the same time, J.T. and I busied ourselves at cooking up modestly ambitious schemes for bringing our timeless masterpieces to the attention of the Great Unwashed. To that end, we lined up joint readings and signings and book fairs throughout the entire length and breadth of the tri-county area, from Sadieville to Nonesuch, culminating in a show at Institute 193 of J.T.’s original pages of Juanita that would include, as an Extra Added Attraction, a little sidebar display of the original McClanahands. The familiar little changelings that had brightened my dismal quarters in La Honda were gonna hang in a gallery, just like real art! And it would all start happening in the third week of …
February, 2020. Yep, our books came into the world as healthy, bawling fraternal twins … and arrived in a dead heat with the trumpedemic. My book actually appeared a week or so ahead of J.T.’s, so I got in a handful of readings before — alas, alas — the world pulled in the sidewalks. A pandemic, it seems, is not a copacetic time for drawing a crowd; Juanita made her debut and was greeted with a deafening silence, and has scarcely been heard from since.
If and when the pandemic ever ends, I propose a giant Second Coming party, an extravaganza whereat our admirers can assemble in vast multitudes, and praise and celebrate us to their hearts’ content, and purchase our books by the merdeload, if you’ll pardon my French. In the meantime, J.T. and Institute 193 made some rearrangements behind the scene, with the result that the peripatetic McClanahands have had a show all their own at the gallery, which begat a successful Kickstarter campaign to purchase them for the University of Kentucky Art Museum, where they now abide, presumably until the end of time, in the stately splendor of the museum’s Permanent Collection.”
I remember Ed telling me that when Kesey observed Ed’s drawings in his La Honda writing shack, he shook his head with a tsk-tsk-tsk, remarking: “Look what dope has done to a perfectly respectable writer.”
Ed himself has said to me he always wanted to be a cartoonist but never felt like he had the chops and drifted into typing as his primary craft. However, if one ever looks at copies of Ed’s manuscripts on paper, those archival paper products exhibit in the margins copious doodles by Mr. McClanahan. In fact, those marginalized manuscript doodlings by Ed’s own McClanahand were one of the influences on my approach to adapting/smelting Ed’s prose story into the form we call comics.
Speaking of comics, not only did cartoonists such as Robert Crumb and Ralph Steadman provide cover art for Ed’s books, Ed was absorbing Underground Comix in the 1960s and early 70s as they were happening. When Ed and I met in person to discuss our Juanita project (I’d previously agreed to it during a phone conversation), Ed mentioned the two comics — or comix, as was the preferred spelling of that movement/era in comics — that slapped his eyes upside his head the most: Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary and Legion of Charlies by artist Greg Irons and writer Tom Veitch. For me, I had to research the backpages of comix history to receive the “bad influent” (to quote the turn of phrasing by Ed’s own titular Juanita character) of Undgeround Comix. But in that research in my own lives and times, I, too, arrived at the same comix as Ed did in chronological-time.
I was able to tell Ed that not only did I know those two works, that Green and his wife (cartoonist Carol Tyler) were at that time living in Cincinnati. Not only were they living there, but that I had visited them both at that Ohio home and even sang “happy birthday” to Justin on his 70th birthday, with his wife, and comics curator/librarian/scholar, Caitlin McGurk, a few years previously. Greg Irons died in an accident, hit by a bus in Thailand in 1984, and while I never met Veitch or his brother Rick (a comics artist/writer of his own impressive merits), yet another comic book artist/writer and scholar, Stephen R. Bissette, was/is a friend and mentor to me, not only from reading his Swamp Thing comics published by DC(collaborative work with Alan Moore, Rick Veitch etc.), but from having inhabited White River Junction, VT as an official/unofficial artist-in-residence 2011–12 in the community surrounding the Center for Cartoon Studies, where Steve was on faculty (he’s now retired from teaching). Meeting and hanging out with Bissette on a weekly basis at Steve’s gatherings among artists and students a CCS to watch movies was not unlike getting to meet the Veitches, like Bissette, all native Vermonters, by proxy through the prism of Bissette’s story-telling about such folks (Steve being as prone to digressionary fables as Ed and I are prone to fabling our rambling).
Not to mention other figures who warped our mutual heads, like Harvey Kurtzman’s MAD comics, which influenced just about everybody worth influencing in the United States, not just us. While I grew up with MAD as a magazine, long after Kurtzman left the book and the comic switched to magazine format (that’s a long story to be saved for getting knee-deep in comics history), but, again, what Ed experienced in real-time, I experienced retrospectly, as back-pages dug up to discover. Further, Ed was friendly with Underground cartoonist, S. Clay Wilson, sharing a history together that spans some decades. An illustrated letter from Wilson to Ed hangs proudly on the wall in Ed’s writing studio (along with the original art by cartoonist Robert Crumb (and fellow Zap! artist with Wilson) for Ed’s book, Famous People I Have Known).
I never met Wilson, but his work was both known and personally important to me, as another “bad influent” from that/his subversive generation/era of comix. Rewinding the clock back to 2008, Ed had been out in California, socializing with Wilson, and pitched the idea of him doing something with Juanita, which Wilson (or Clay, as Ed calls him) tentatively expressed interest and enthusiasm. Not two weeks later, Wilson either fell or was mugged when walking home late and inebriated, suffering brain damage from which, despite surviving, he never fully recovered. Later, upon publication of mine and Ed’s comic book version of Juanita, along with our Introducer, author of three books on comics, Bob Levin (who conducted a career-spanning interview with him for the The Comics Journal, which was actually the issue on the stands in 2008 at the time the incident that impaired him occurred), mutually agreed to dedicate the book collectively to Wilson. We were able to do this while S. Clay Wilson still walked, if impaired, among us. Sadly, Wilson died this year in February 2021, roughly a year after our book appeared in print with its dedication to the man. And before I forget, our Juanita came out just in time for The Plague, as Ed intimated already, in early 2020, the year that I turned 44 in Feb & Ed turned 88 in Oct. Did somebody say something about trading fours?
Numerology aside, while I’ve made good on my promise to return to the subject of Ed-as-visual-artiste, I want to step sideways here and mention that, sadly, Ed’s physical health, as of this writing, has taken a dip for the worser. We here at Doc Industries are hoping Ed’s health will have itself at turn from the worser towards the better. Ed did make it, recently, on November 6th of 2021 for the Kentucky Book Festival, and we did, finally, sit next to one another, in public for the first time since the book was published in March 2020, and sign some copies of Juanita and the Frog Prince, with Gurney to Ed’s right, Ed in the middle, and me at Ed’s left. Most tables had two authors to a table, not three, and I did not realize before the event that we would all be seated together, but it seems maybe my dreams were aware of it. Gurney didn’t say anything about him disagreeing with me on everything, so at least I know I have yet to slip into that possible, alternate timeline.
Speaking of alternate timelines, Ed agreed at the end of September of this year to conduct an interview via email, but between the agreement and the action, Ed’s turn towards the worser occurred, and he was unable to complete the process. However, before infirmity (hopefully temporary) snatched Ed away from his keyboard, we did start the interview. As it happened, I had just walked around a corner of researching the origins of The Blue Marble, arguably the most widely distributed photograph in the history of humanity, taken by NASA in 1972 of the Earth from space. Like most every other citizen of this planet, I recognized the image. What I did not anticipate walking into at all was the fact that the image exists, in part, due to a mid-1960s vision while tripping on acid by Stewart Brand in San Francisco when the realization that, despite the space program, nobody at NASA apparently had ever thought to turn back to Earth and take a picture.
Sparked by that LSD instigated awareness, Brand’s following campaign, with marketing by promotional buttons, etc. would make enough noise that NASA heard the noise. Not only that, but the Whole Earth Catalog was itself named after this campaign/reality principle (as part of Brand’s activism, in general and with his publication, was motivated by what would come to be labeled environmentalism). Asking Ed about Brand and his awareness of the moves to make the photo, on October 27 (before his health took its unfortunate dip to keep him from typing), he elaborated:
“When I first met Stewart (ca.1965–66), he was traveling around the west in a VW bus with an odd little slideshow presentation he called ‘America Needs Indians,’ in which he raised the pressing existential question: ‘Why haven’t we seen a photo of the whole earth yet?’ — he wore a battered top hat and a fringed leather shirt — in that photo of Kesey and Tim Leary meeting for the first time in my Palo Alto living room, Stewart is in the background, smoking a joint — he was married to a young woman named Lois (or Loys, or Loyce), a mathematician; they were both recent Dartmouth grads, as i recall — he was publishing a newsletter about his visits to intentional communities like Drop City, etc., which (the newsletter) eventually became the first Whole Earth Catalog, while the newsletter itself continued under the rubric Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog — at first he did a couple of issues of the supplement between each issue of the Catalog, and the whole enterprise quickly got the attention of the press, especially Rolling Stone, and became popular almost overnite — then came the Kesey/Krassner-edited issue of the Last Supplement to the WEC, with Crumb’s rendering of the Last Supper on the cover (the one where Jesus is saying ‘He who shits in the road will meet flies upon his return’), and finally the Last WEC itself, complete w/ Divine Right’s Trip — “
And: yes. You read that correctly. If you never heard it before, you’re hearing it now, Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary, arguably the two most recognizable forces in bringing psychedelics to the mainstream of the American experience did, in fact, first meet in Ed’s living room in Palo Alto.
One thing about Ed. If writers work their craft in isolation, sitting down to the desk and the writer’s tools, Mr. McClanahan has certainly concurrently made a (writer’s) life of cultivating comrades and having fun. From Ken Kesey to National Book Award-winning novelist Robert Stone and the rest of the Prankster-crew to his fellow native Kentuckians such as the aforementioned Wendell Berry, Gurney Norman, etc., Ed’s always maintained a gang of wild-eyed artists to maintain creativity as a shared, communal experience, in addition to the singular business of writing books.
In the process of our collaborative Juanita book coming to be, once every few weeks or months, I’d schlep into Ed’s weekly West 6th Brewery lunches in Lexington to share art and provide show-and-tell morsels from my comic/book collection to be considered for eyeball kicks by those present. Those gathering including a cast of characters such as artist Johnny Lackey, whom Ed mentioned above, as well as photographer Guy Mendes, journalist/author Teri Carter, writer/scientist Tom Kimmerer, writer/historian Richard Bailey & Pulitzer Prize finalist Bobbie Ann Mason (who recognized the Krazy Kat/George Herriman pen on my lapel and sparked a conversation: she’s a fan (as a cartoonist, always nice, like with Ed, to encounter literate persons among writers (if you’ll excuse my pro-comics bias, heh)), and many others in orbit around Planet Ed in the McClanaverse. If Ed maintained some version of a round table of weirdos from his 20s to his 80s, I was certainly glad to make a seat for myself at Ed’s table in the most recent decade of that solid 60 year run that keeps running.
Speaking of Ed’s table, the most recent time I hung out with him, just me & him, in his writing studio at the house he shares with his wife, Hilda, on Walton Avenue in Lexington, which was as common an occasion as attending the West 6th collective gathering but got not common at all until the vaccinated phase of the pandemic allowed us to resume my dew-dropping in the McCasa-han abode. Wait. I got lost in that sentence. Ahem: I’m at Ed’s place in June 2021, and we’re talking. The subject of Gurney’s novel Divine Right’s Trip comes up and Ed asks me if I’ve read it. I tell him I have read it, but not since I was eighteen years old or thereabouts, and I’d like to read it again. However, I inform Ed, my copy, one of the Gnomon reissue versions that put the novel back into print and into its current shape back in 1990 (I read it circa 1994) seems to have gone inexplicably missing from the Doc-shelves. My theory is I let somebody borrow my copy, and that specific never made its way back to me or my specific shelf. While talking about the fact that Gnomon edition features an Afterword by Ed, he shuffles over to his shelves and returns, tossing to me his own 1972 edition of the Bantam mass market paperback of Divine Right’s Trip, telling me it’s for me to keep and replace my previous copy, gone wayward.
Noting that the Bantam version lacks his postscript to the 1990/Gnomon version, he tells me an oral tradition variation of his Afterword. He and Ed were sharing neighboring writing studios in Palo Alto, CA when Gurney was feeding the waiting press of Whole Earth Catalog. Gurney had painted himself into a corner of plot, in which he couldn’t paint himself out of that specific corner. Returning to his office, Gurney received a phone call. Eureka! One of his own characters called him, providing information to solve that sticking plot point, and, thus, Norman had the ending he needed to resolve his serialized fiction.
Also, I have to inform the reader the composition of this piece, on some dreary, rain drenched Sunday morning on the 21st day of the 11th month of the aforementioned year of 2021 is experiencing a powerful sense of what the French (and even some folks in Paris, Kentucky) call: déjà vu. Have I sat here before writing the same words that you read now? I realize, come to think on it, I’m having a powerful sense of having previously dreamed about myself writing about Gurney and Ed in Palo Alto. And, even if it was a dream of my recent past, now it’s a present, the present of me writing, and you reading, which may or not be more actual, factual than the dream itself. Makes it feel like some part of a trip is kicking in on me here, but I’m not currently dosing myself with anything except coffee.
It’s only recently that I realized that my mirror-dream mirrors the opening of Ed’s prose and our comix-variation of Juanita and the Frog Prince. In the setting of Burdock county, the reader is informed that there are four clocks atop the courthouse, none of which agree on the same time. The story suggests that time is a slippery fish, and what could be true in one timeline may not be true in another, and if one hears the Burdock county tolling, it may or may not signify that time is what you think it might be.
Maybe some other time I’ll spin for you, Dear Reader, one of my versions of one of one of Ed’s versions of a yarn of the night he, Robert Stone, and a few others drove into North Beach to see John Coltrane and Lenny Bruce perform on the same evening, at different venues. Well, Stone didn’t make it to Bruce, as, with his cup to the brim full of peyote(as was everbody else on the sojourn, except for Ed, driving the VW bus, as “designated driver” of the VW bus), he became convinced Coltrane’s music was repeating, “Bob…Bob…Bob…” in his general direction, bringing on The Fear and inspiring Stone, with his wife Janice following him, to flee the scene before they made it to Lenny’s set. That’s a good one. Come to think of it, instead of telling you that story some other time, I’ll do it up it visual, as a comic. I’d like to do a book of Ed’s stories that he tells around the table or in his studio, but tales that he’s not as of yet actually written about. Those unwritten oral traditions I keep imagining collected as a comic book. EDification: the Further Adventures of Captain Kentucky might be a good title. I’ll get back to you on that.
What I can tell you is that as soon as I got back home from that most recent one-on-one in person visit with Ed, my Gnomon edition of Gurney’s Divine Right’s Trip materialized. I had not seen it — or at least did not think I had — for years. Where did it go? How or even why did it return? Did my subconscious grift Ed into gifting me his personal Bantam paperback copy?
Hold on a second, my phone is ringing.
I apologize for that. Ed McClanahan himself, in fact, just rang.
Not Ed ringing from Lexington or in 2021, but it turns out, Ed ringing me from Palo Alto, circa 1970–71, the same year that he and Gurney shared neighboring writing studios there. He said he’s phoning me on the other line while Gurney’s in his office getting a call, which may or may not be a character from The Gurn’s novel. I didn’t think to ask Ed if he actually has a phone in his own office, being that his Afterword he will write in 1990 suggests Gurney had no phone, even if Ed also firmly believes a character from The Gurn’s fiction did in actuality ring him up to fix a plot problem. Luckily, Ed reported that that his future paperback copy of Gurney’s novel that does not exist yet, he, in fact,intends to give me, even if he will not know that is his intention until 2021 (I will not myself become born for five more years after his 1971 phone call).
“Relax. Life is a fiction,” Ed said. “Even if phone calls from characters in fiction are real. You never know when anybody else or even apparently lost books or wayward characters are going to show up. It all depends on which clock atop the Burdock county courthouse you choose to believe.” I heard him on the other end of the line firing up what I assumed to be some bizarre tobacco substitute, but this is mere assumption, conjecture.
“See you in the funny pages,” he laughed on the exhale, before I could ask any more questions, hanging up the phone.
Whatever time it was or is, may Ed’s time always be time to enjoy, in or out of time. I’m certainly glad I’ve had my times with Ed, and I’ll gladly if not greedily, hope for more. I think I hear the courthouse clock tolling thrice, but being no soothsayer, I’ll just relax, as Ed suggested, and rather than try to suss meaning from the elements I instead simply ponder all possibilities future-past, having happened, perhaps not happened yet, or continuing to happen now. Thus, we reach the end of this in & out & with time story of mirrors, of clocks, of comix, of tables, of Kentucky, of California, of Gurney, of Ed and back again, to the sound of bells tolling time as something that flows both ways and maybe more ways than two, at least when you’re standing on the banks of Yackingitup River.
Suffix:
Not the last time I saw Ed, but what was to be the final time I visited him in person, just he & I, at his home on Walton avenue in Lexington, he taught me a turn of phrase one of his cohorts over the years coined: “If I don’t see you in the future, I’ll see you in the pasture.” I need to ask him who came up with that, but like other dangling participles of questions, the conversation is closed now with Ed’s westing. I’ve also meant 1000 times to ask Ed how he met S. Clay Wilson, and 1000 times I forgot. I think it had to do with mutual friends in Montana, but details slip away from me, like the 1000s of other converstional disgressions I would have followed up on or over or under with Ed have slipped away now, like everytyhing slips away from all of us, eventually.
Or does it? Futures and pastures, circles and cycles. And this writing began as a lighting of a candle, to keep a trading of fours going, but what I see now from here is an Ed McClanahan-sized hole from my point of perspective of the stars from the ground. But the light remains. I am made happy that a comet such as Ed burned so brightly and for so long in my view. Retrospectly, I realize I was writing all of this to maintain Ed’s spirit, to keep that spirit close and to care for it in some way, the best or at least the only way I knew how, as I had a feeling in my gut his bodily-self might be leaving my/our orbit soon, and so he/it goes.
The final time I physically saw Ed, his daughters had got him safely back into the car to take him home from the Kentucky Book Festival on November 6th. He was drinking a milkshake. With the window rolled down and me leaning over talking to Ed as he sipped his shake, once the car was ready to roll, I slipped to him a If I don’t see you in the future, I’ll see you in the pasture which got a laugh as they pulled away. Not the worst way to say good-bye.
Prior to that good-bye, the final time I visited Ed at his home, in his studio occured on October 2nd, with my friend, photographer Carey Gough and her partner, Daryn. I talked to Ed on the phone Friday before that. I was meeting with Carey and Daryn to not only visit with them but to also view the posthumous retrospective at Institute 193 (the same Institute responsible for giving Ed his first exhibition as a visual artist in 2020) by the artist Mike Goodlett, a friend of mine in addition to being a superb visual artist, who had quickly died much too soon/too young, due to complications resulting from pancreatic cancer.
Ed had indicated that if I called him when we were done, he’d give us a last minute “green or abort,” relative to whether or not he was up for company. Daryn had accumulated a couple of things, a coffee table book of photographs of Stanford University and a magazine with a interview with Ken Kesey he’d dug up in his paper product/book hunting and gatherings, which he wanted to give to Ed.
We got the “green” order from him and stopped by for a spell. In good spirits, if less mobile due to his arthritis worsening, we shared stories and laughs. Ed mentioned to us how much he enjoyed reading recent drafts of manuscripts-in-progression by Travis Kitchens what that Travis had shared with Ed (and me) via email, joking that, despite both Ed & I being in touch with him via said electronic mail, betwen the pandemic and the deep blue sea, neither of us had yet to actually meet in-personable the local-to-Lexington impressario behind the Emperor Records label/writer-investigator of both inner-and-outer (as well as regional) spaces, of which all of present recognized & like others have noted: Ed always maintained enthusiasm to read and respond to new writing/writers.
Carey took a few photos of Ed’s studio as we separated the chit from the chat: Ed’s boots, his lampshade and the photo of Ed on the wall with Wendell Berry, James Baker Hall, and Gurney Norman are there. Ed’s there but you can’t see him, just like you can’t see any of us in her photographs. Rather, you can see Ed, as he’s in the photo by Guy Mendes hanging on the wall in Carey’s photo. With Ed now bodily gone, Carey’s photographs reverberate. Where’s Ed? He’s right there. Where are any of us? We’re all here. Or there. On our way from one space to another space.
But to back up the rig one last time before I drive away from these words, saying “so long” to you, Dear Reader, as I/we also say “so long” to Mr. McClanahan…I almost forgot one last detail of the last day I’d see Ed and the first (and only) event we’d get to do for our Juanita book. Inscribing/signing our books, I was doodling along with signing, as are my habits. A character that I was drawing in the books seemed to emerge fully-formed that Nov. 6th, but spontaneously so: a figure of a fella with a single eye on his forehead, grinning through his loony, cartoony/single eye-ball’d condidtion. I’d never drawn this guy before, but I kept drawing him (folks who purcahsed books at the KY Book Fest may confirm this fact). It was only weeks after, since Ed died & just recently, that it hit me:
Wait, it’s the runaway third-eye from 2002 that got Ed giggling & that’s where that eye landed, on the guy that’s showing up on the books we’re signing…the eye that got away from our first hang out out showed back up for the last time…
Quotes from Ed have been culled from conversations in-person, on the phone or from email correspondence between us, Ed’s unpublished manuscript shared by the author with This Reporter, draft dated May 2020, Hand Jive (the McClanahands: a Provenance), and at least one phone call from Palo Alto, circa 1971.
