The King of Chaos by Kate M. Johnson

A man named Arrington de Dionyso is sleeping in my living room tonight. He is going to sleep after playing a concert in my living room. I'll call it a concert for now because I'm tired and haven't invented a new vocabulary yet. All of us who were there know that we will have to come up with a better word than that to describe tonight when the Long Run comes to bite us in the ass. That's all I'll say for now. I came home this afternoon wondering what he looked like, Arrington, having only heard some of his music and seen his drawings (and heard of his bizarre line of hand-made Christmas cards). I found him calling back to me from the dark end of my house, somewhere betwixt the pool table and the kitchen.
"Arrington?" I called. "Is that you?" "Yes it is!" "Where are you?" I stepped into my dark living room. "Why is it so dark in here?" He came into sight, a thin man in a brown suit with low-riding thick-rimmed glasses and a short, gentle beard shadowing his face. There was a young blonde man behind him setting up drums. Arrington was holding his guitar case in one hand. "Hi there," he said. "I can't find the lights." I was suddenly overwhelmed with relief that Arrington was not seven feet tall with dreadlocks and pointed teeth, or a steel-eyed albino with an attitude, or a dark monk in a robe wearing a scowl and sunglasses. Or a big-bearded man in a black hat and aviator glasses, playing his music through stolen cigarette butts. When I first heard his music I had imagined all of these things. But he shook my hand warmly, smiling crooked teeth. They were crooked in a way I've seen before, where some teeth fall back and others fall forward and claim the light in prominent white bodies. His eye teeth came forward and smiled at me like two smiling eyes and I knew I would like Arrington. Most people know Arrington as Old Time Relijun. That's what his band is called, and that's what you read on the CD when you pick it up, and decipher the little red printed letters from the scribbles of Arrington's new-childhood drawings that swirl around the cover in pictograph renderings of the Pope and the Virgin Mary with Christ in Utero. He has been described as sounding like a cross between the White Stripes and Captain Beefheart, if they had a child with Howlin' Wolf and some Tuvan throat singers. Some just said he was musical chaos. I liked the sound of that. Before he came to play music at my house, I heard only one of his songs, a five or six-minute epic called "Archaeopteryx Claw," in which he plays one note on the guitar over and over while singing two notes at once. "Archaeopteryx Claw," with its howling vocals and catchy chorus of "Eat it raw! Eat it raw, Archaeopteryx Cl-aw, Archaeopteryx Cl-aw!" caught on with the guys in my boyfriend Travis's dorm and they insisted that Arrington come play a concert at our school. They had been willing to house the concert in their dorm, but Arrington's guitar would have overpowered a forum on the meat packing industry that was scheduled for the same time, so it was relocated to my living room. This was not a problem-I'd had somewhere close to a dozen rock bands stay with me before, and hosted a few concerts, but I'd heard from many sources that Arrington wasn't like anybody else who'd previously graced my hide-a-bed. It wasn't that I was worried about the concert-music had a tendency to fill my living room well, and I imagined he'd put on a wonderful show-it's that I wasn't sure Walla Walla was prepared for him, for another introduction to chaos. Not very many people in this town listen to Captain Beefheart, and if they do, it's because they're either left over from the sixties or pretending to still live there. The rest of us are easy to underestimate. Plain looking kids from homes with married
parents, who like regular folks and regular music that follows major or minor scales and has an ascending key change at the end. Although Travis' friends were all for it, I didn't know how well Tuvan throat singing would go over on a Thursday night. His last name means, I'm guessing, 'of Dionysus.' I'm not going to take the time to see what it means by looking it up on the internet or what have you, although I am writing this in a library filled with all kinds of great literature and references, and more than enough answers to the question of what "de Dionyso" means. I want it to mean "of Dionysus." I'm not sure if it's even his last name, but I want it to be his last name. People used to say that Grateful Dead concerts, in their heyday of the Fillmore and Avalon Ballroom and Merry Prankster acid tests, were "Dionysian" experiences. That everyone present took part in some great moment of color and flavor and grinning and boozing and dancing that made your stomach toss but forget to follow through because it was too happy. I always picture Dionysus, the god of drinking and eating and making merry and probably sex and all things that happen after hours at colleges all across America, I always picture Dionysus as the laurel-crowned John Belushi in Animal House. He probably looked a lot like that in real life, before we forgot what to do with Greek gods and turned them into Disney characters and things we read about in college. I'm not sure if what Arrington gave us was Dionysian-we did not eat or drink, and it was a whole new merriment, but I'd like to think that afterwards our faces were washed over in something the gods would have been proud of. There were thirty, thirty-five, maybe forty of us in the living room, standing on the hardwood around Arrington and his microphone. Before he began to play for us the lights were on, and he was a small man in a brown suit with a white shirt, the son of a Methodist Minister and graduate of the Evergreen State College, speaking English. Then the lights went out (did they go out on their own?) with only the blue lamp-bulb making underwater light come from up above, and that little man started playing guitar, started hollering something guttural and visceral, something stemming from the intestines and cell nuclei, some hard atonal howl, and he was something else.
"I'm a vaaaammpiiiaaar." Did he say vampire? My blood vessels perked up. "I'm A VAAAAAAAAMPIRE!" I believed him. Twenty men and a few swooning girls huddled around the guitar and microphone, and the vampire whose wicked whirling vocal chords and wide-open gaping mouth drug out sounds we hadn't heard since our sticky days in the womb. He pulled the strings of his guitar like he was ripping railroad ties out of the ground, pinching notes into blues and twisted up tones, and we all started dancing. My baaaay-bayy, she-e---e do-aw-aw-awn't love me no more. My baaaaaaaaaaay bay, sheeeeh, doawawawawan't lohohohohve me no more! His baby didn't love him no more. It came out like the freed souls of two-hundred black dead blues musicians whose babies didn't love them no more. He roared the notes out of his throat all at once, ripping them off of his trachea and dragging them up and out, and they came out exposed and ragged, gnarled and scraped with dirt all over them and blood in their hair. This was some music. Nobody really knew what to do, but dancing felt all right. It's not often that someone screams their guts out inches from your face, blasting some centuries-old note at your eyeballs, their body swinging against the microphone like a sandbag ready to fall from a hot air balloon. But
somehow it felt comfortable, stepping out of being college students with modest haircuts and solid-colored clothes and into this realm where a strange little man was becoming a wailing pair of isolated human lungs in front of us, inviting us to dance with him off into wherever he came from.
His baby didn't love him no more. We just followed him, giggling at first and then after we stopped giggling. My baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaybayyyyy. After we stopped thinking "this can't be happening in Walla Walla" or "I don't know what my mom would think of me hanging around folks who can sing two notes at once," we just followed him along into his old time relijun.

An hour later (really?) when our jaws were open and still dropping, and his throat still wrangling a new rock Pentecost out over his tongue, we stared at him and the once-silent nighttime streets of Walla Walla in the back of my mind became fiery and full of lions, and Arrington was a wailing tooth ripped out of a lion's jaw. I pictured the Bloodvessel guy riding one of those lions, his beard turning into a ratty mane as he rode. Then Arrington pulled a bass clarinet from the ground, breathed into it, and murdered the minor and major scales like dogs with a continuous swooping spiral of sounds, and the clean cut kids standing around him breathed in the notes like gas fumes, getting very high on the souls of those dead blues musicians as they flew out one after the other. And it wasn't until he turned the clarinet on end and breathed into it (or was it before) that we realized it wasn't the clarinet we were hearing. It was his voice, or the voice of his growling lungs, rumbling away in layered octaves, humming over each other waaaooorwaaaaoooowwwwwrrrr two, three, four notes at once, all digging into each other and sweeping through the hollow body of the clarinet. He stood as a pillar for the sound, his mouth an O channeling it out. So when the note faded and his voice burst back human and alive as Swing Low Sweet Chariot we had no question in singing that very instant with him. Our voices all came out sudden and heavy and loud together, bigger and thicker than any church choir I've seen this side of the Walla Walla River. I looked over Jordan and what did I see? COMIN FOR TO CARRY ME
HOME? Saw a band of angels comin' for me-e. COMIN FOR TO CARRY ME HOMMMmmmmmm. Our voices grew bigger, swallowing each other into one big mouth comin for to carry me home until we rested warmly together on the last note, let it soften and age there and quietly die with our mouths open and our hands at our sides. Arrington was sweating in the middle, blinking sweat behind his glasses, breathing through big clean lungs as he cleared the air away, returning to English to say "Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen."

Before I left Arrington at my house to go do homework I gave him a hug around his ribs and thanked him for coming to Walla Walla. "These things have to happen out here," he smiled. "Something's got to happen in the middle of nowhere. Otherwise it's just one big nowhere." Tonight he sleeps in my living room at the smiling center of the middle of nowhere, with the crown of chaos resting upon his brow. The King is dead. Long live the King.