This Morbid Life: Essays

By Loren Rhoads

What others have called an obsession with death is really a desperate romance with life. Guided by curiosity, compassion, and a truly strange sense of humor, this particular morbid life is detailed through a death-positive collection of 45 confessional essays. Along the way, author Loren Rhoads takes prom pictures in a cemetery, spends a couple of days in a cadaver lab, eats bugs, survives the AIDS epidemic, chases ghosts, and publishes a little magazine called Morbid Curiosity.

Originally written for zines from Cyber-Psychos AOD to Zine World and online magazines from Gothic.Net to Scoutie Girl, these emotionally charged essays showcase the morbid curiosity and dark humor that transformed Rhoads into a leading voice of the curious and creepy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Automatism Press
• Release date: Oct 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781735187631

Loren Rhoads

Loren Rhoads is the author of This Morbid Life, Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel, 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die, a space opera trilogy, and a short story collection called Unsafe Words.She is also co-author -- with Brian Thomas -- of the As Above, So Below series: Lost Angels and Angelus Rose.See what she's up to next at lorenrhoads.com.

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This Morbid Life: Essays

Loren Rhoads

Automatism Press

San Francisco

This Morbid Life

Copyright © 2021 by Loren Rhoads.

All rights reserved.

Essays by Loren Rhoads.

Cover art © 2020 by Lynne Hansen at Lynne Hansen Art.

Cover design by Automatism Press.

Interior design by Automatism Press.

This book is a work of nonfiction. Some names have been changed.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles, reviews, social media, and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. To request permission, contact Automatism Press at the address below or at [e-mail].

Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

ISBN 978-1-7351876-2-4

ISBN (ebook) 978-1-7351876-3-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021914472

Check out author readings and other events or join Loren’s monthly newsletter for behind-the-scenes glimpses and morbid travel essays at https://lorenrhoads.com/.

Automatism Press

PO Box 210767

San Francisco, CA 94121 USA

www.automatismpress.com

For Jeff, who I expect will outlive me.

WELCOME TO MY MORBID LIFE

I DISCOVERED ZINES in the early 1980s, spread across dealers’ tables at my local science fiction conventions. Those were mostly fanfic, but they inspired me to publish my first zine the summer I left high school. Sanity, Ltd. collected stories, essays, and artwork created by my friends. My best friend’s father surreptitiously copied it on the Xerox machine at work. We sold the zines at the local media convention. Sanity, Ltd. only lasted four issues, but it taught me the joy of seeing my hard work in print.

I transferred to the Communications program at the University of Michigan and studied journalism. What I really wanted to do with my life was to write short stories like my hero Ray Bradbury, but my parents insisted that I learn a skill that might result in an actual job. Mostly what I learned from journalism school was that I did not want to work for a daily paper on a strict deadline, asking strangers how they felt when something horrific happened to their families. That said, I learned a lot about writing tight, clean stories. It might not have been the education I wanted, but it was probably the one I needed.

After college, I struggled through a series of terrible non-writing jobs before moving to San Francisco with my husband, noise musician Mason Jones. Once we’d gotten settled in the city in the late Eighties, Mason saw a flyer for a talk given by V. Vale and Andrea Juno of RE/Search Books (more about that in the confessions that follow). Vale and AJ initiated us into the world of independent publishers.

In addition, Mason was (and is) a record collector, the more obscure the better. He could literally spend hours poking through every album in every rack in a store. I’ve waited outside record stores in London and Tokyo as he shopped. I was delighted when I discovered the zine racks at Tower Records, where I could spend hours on my own. Picture me—a white girl off a farm in Michigan—standing between two or three guys in studded leather jackets, paging through Angry Thoreauan and Monozine and Cometbus.

I started writing for other people’s zines. Unlike my experience with writing short stories, the first essay I finished was subsequently accepted by the first place I sent it. Female Bonding, the story of my friend Christine’s first labial piercing, was published by File 13 in Spring 1992. I wrote for You Could Do Worse, the zine that took over when File 13 ceased publication, and Browbeat, my friend Mike Rizzi’s zine. Later I wrote for Chaotic Order, Bloodreams, and Cyber-Psychos AOD, as well as for Tail Spins, Monozine, and Zine World.

It’s hard to imagine the massive variety of zines that thrived in the Nineties. Every style of music had its zines, of course, but there were personal zines and thrifting zines and zines about illnesses and bad jobs and traveling… So many unfiltered voices were published all at once. The spectrum was truly inspiring.

In 1994, Mason and I founded Automatism Press. We published two books in the next couple of years. Lend the Eye a Terrible Aspect was a collection of first-person essays and short stories interrogating North America at the end of the 20th century. Contributors included Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys, Don Bajema (author of Winged Shoes and a Shield), Stephen Holman (creator of the cartoons Life with Loopy and Phantom Investigators), recording artist Deborah Jaffe (Master/Slave Relationship), performance artist blackhumour, and Mark Lo (publisher of the legendary File 13). Factsheet Five called the book, An intriguing collection of fiction and essays by some of the more interesting voices from the San Francisco/Los Angeles axis.

Death’s Garden: Relationships with Cemeteries was the first book I edited on my own. Originally, it was meant to showcase cemetery photographs by my friend Blair, but as I pursued the project, I discovered that everyone’s life has been touched by at least one graveyard. The book blossomed into a collection of over two dozen essays and more than 200 photographs involving 27 contributors, ranging from confrontationalist Lydia Lunch and avant-garde ceramics professor Mary Jo Bole to artist/poet Jane Handel and many authors who were published for the first time. Alternative Press said, "Death’s Garden is smart enough to know it’s not the where and when of certain burial grounds that intrigues us, it’s the why as well. There’s a certain joy about Death’s Garden which is hard to pin down." That joy in exploring the darker aspects of human life is the inspiration behind my life’s work.

After Automatism Press published those first two books, I started to think about editing a zine again. I decided that what I liked best about putting together Death’s Garden was discovering the deepest thoughts of its contributors. I never had any doubt about the zine’s title. Morbid Curiosity started out in 1996 as one woman with a dream, but ended eleven years later after publishing 310 survivor narratives about encounters with the unsavory, unwise, unorthodox, or unusual: all the dark elements that make life worth living.

Contributors probed every facet of birth and death, explored illicit substances and what passed for modern healthcare, investigated graveyards, survived natural disasters, escaped serial killers and UFOs, celebrated a variety of sexualities, and so much more. They wandered from Auschwitz to Malaysia, from Hiroshima to Mexico, and all across the Americas. Through it all, Morbid Curiosity questioned authority, consensus reality, and accepted wisdom, often with a black sense of humor.

Contributors included Michael Arnzen, Trey Barker, Alan M. Clark, John Everson, Ray Garton, Brian Hodge, Charlee Jacob, Nancy Kilpatrick, Simon Wood, and others at the cutting edge of horror, speculative fiction, and mystery—except that, in Morbid Curiosity, the horror stories they related were all true.

In the end, no less than The Washington Post wrote the zine’s obituary: "For a decade, Morbid Curiosity has been a confessional where Americans revealed their deepest, darkest secrets. The title was no joke: Morbid Curiosity was definitely morbid. It was also frequently gross, disgusting, perverse—and very funny, if you prefer your humor to come in a decidedly dark hue."

I learned a lot about writing—and telling the truth—from my years editing Morbid Curiosity. The book you hold in your hands/see on your screen is a collection of my essays—some previously published and others written especially for this book—covering everything from taking prom pictures in the cemetery to spending several days in a cadaver lab, from getting high with a friend dying of AIDS to eating bugs in a science museum, from looking for the limits of consciousness to chasing ghosts. It hopscotches from Michigan to San Francisco to La Specola in Florence. Luckily, curiosity does not often kill the cat, especially if she’s light on her feet.

Everything that follows is true. Some of the pieces I wrote for Morbid Curiosity are included here, alongside a column I wrote about visiting cemeteries for Gothic.Net, essays I wrote for women’s lifestyle websites Jane and Scoutie Girl, the gay men’s magazine Unzipped, a book published by the sex toy shop Good Vibrations, a booklet that accompanied a cassette noise compilation published by Charnel Music, the Horror Writers Association’s blog and newsletter, and zines from File 13 to Zine World.

It has been, as they say, a long, strange trip. I’m grateful for all the editors who gave me space to tell my truth. Thank you to Mason Jones, L.S. Johnson, Dorian Katz, and Jean Batt for their help in preparing this manuscript, and to M. Christian for his encouragement and support.

I’ve been blessed by good friends who have accompanied me on my adventures and allowed me to come along—and document—theirs. This book is a love letter to thank them.

Welcome to my morbid life.

TRUE-LIFE ROMANCE

PAUL WAS MY first straight big-girl crush. He was a year older than me. We met in typing class because I was reading Spock Must Die. He had beautiful blue eyes, the color of a summer lake. The year of his senior prom, I was thrilled when he asked me to be his date. We doubled with Peter and Kathy.

After they picked me up and we went through the ritual of corsages, Paul suggested we take pictures of us all dolled up: they played into some sort of vampire fantasy of his. The location he had in mind for this photo shoot? The local mausoleum.

Prom Night was rainy and cold as only April in Michigan can be, when you’re desperate for summer to begin. We were kids, of course; none of us owned a wrap or a coat or a cape classy enough to wear over our high school finery. I had a lace shawl to drape over the chiffon sleeves of my dress, but it did nothing to fill the dress’s deep scoop neckline or to keep me warm.

Paul wore a rented black morning coat with black velvet lapels. With his black bow tie and cerulean eyes, he was the man of my fevered teenage dreams. The shame of it was that, at the time of the prom, Paul was fucking Brad, who was also fucking our double date Peter, Peter’s younger sister, and anyone else who succumbed to his power of persuasion. These were the days before AIDS education. Anyway, we all felt doomed in the stifling small town where we struggled to grow up. I had once given Brad an extremely inept blow job in the front seat of my mother’s car while parked at our old elementary school, but he didn’t come. The pinching he gave my nipples left me anything but aroused. After that, I kept out of arm’s reach.

Paul was much more of a gentleman, which is to say he had a prehensile tongue and very polite hands. I would have given him my virginity, all that was left after my inventive and deeply perverse girlfriend had gotten done with me. In those days, I held a strong conviction that all people were bisexual; some were simply more honest and adventurous. I believed that Paul wanted me. If we’d gone alone to that graveyard, I would’ve done everything to the best of my ability to prove myself right.

I don’t think words now can express how much I wanted—physically yearned—to fuck Paul. Except that you’ve been there, too: in love with the idea of someone, desperately craving his or her hands on your flesh. I thought if my skin were softer or more pale, if my hair was more silken, if my eyes flashed with the right radiance, he would find me irresistible. I hadn’t grasped that the more feminine I made myself, the more opposite I became to what he needed. In retrospect, the inarticulacy of youth is piquant and sweet. At the time, however, I suffered in a circle of hell and didn’t understand why.

Probably it was a blessing that we didn’t get to that graveyard alone.

Peter’s date Kathy, while just a sophomore, was one of those girls who could hold her tongue and destroy you with a disapproving glance. She was cuttingly intelligent and probably a little shy, too. I never got to know her, really, but my gay friends fluttered around her like moths.

Except that I didn’t yet know for certain that Peter was gay. Nobody dared come out in high school in those days. We had an unspoken understanding amongst ourselves that we were all queer to varying degrees, but Paul and I—I think—were still hoping it might not be true.

All I knew was that Peter drank, which seemed seductively dangerous to a sixteen-year-old, and that he could drive. He’d borrowed his aunt’s red Chevette to squire us around on Prom Night.

After we ditched the dance, our first stop was out on River Road at Sunset Hills. Tucked toward the back of the graveyard rose a minimalist gothic mausoleum. Peter navigated the slick blacktop to park at the base of the mausoleum steps. That meant we hadn’t far to run through the drizzle to pose for Paul’s point-and-shoot camera.

Unfortunately, the rain also meant that Paul couldn’t back up far enough to get much of the gothic entranceway into the frame. The bright white flashes in the darkness seemed risky, as if driving through the opened gates across from the cemetery office hadn’t been daring enough. Paranoia and the rain forced us back into the Chevette.

Paul was extremely disappointed. While Kathy and I fussed over our damp hair, Peter suggested another graveyard. This one was farther away, actually in Flint. (You’ve seen Roger & Me? That’s the Flint of the era I’m talking about.)

My mother had grown up in Flint and still taught there, but I rarely went there myself and never at night. Flint was what we small-town kids considered a big city: dark, hazardous, and mostly abandoned. I know in retrospect those things weren’t necessarily true, but there were certainly no lighted storefronts, no people strolling the rainy sidewalks on that Saturday night.

Once again Peter drove through the cemetery’s open gates—right past the caretaker’s house—and down into the valleys of Glenwood Cemetery.

For all the times I’d been driven by it, I’d never been in Glenwood before. I didn’t yet appreciate that Jacob Smith, the first white settler at the Grand Traverse of the Flint River, lay buried there, along with two of Michigan’s governors and thirty-eight city mayors. Peter reported that Charles Mott, benefactor of the local community college—which Paul would attend in the fall—was buried there, along with the Whitings (who’d founded the civic auditorium where we served as volunteer ushers). Harlow Curtice, one-time president of the General Motors Corporation and Time magazine’s 1955 Man of the Year kept company with J. Dallas Dort, co-founder of the Durant-Dort Carriage Company, which later turned into General Motors. One of the highways east of town was named for Dort. In the decades before we were born, when the auto plants worked 24/7 churning out cars to mobilize the American Dream, there had been plenty of money made. Glenwood was where the moneyed in Flint buried their dead.

Established in 1857, Glenwood was one of the first Michigan cemeteries to follow the garden cemetery fashion established by Mount Auburn in Massachusetts. The paths that meandered through Glenwood’s rolling landscape were intended to provide interesting drives for Sunday carriage rides.

On this gloomy night, the four of us succeeded in getting thoroughly lost. Although the neoclassical public mausoleum sat on the crest of the hill to the right from the entrance, Peter hadn’t wanted to drive directly there. The road ran along the fence, visible from the street outside. We speculated on the consequences of being caught in a graveyard at midnight, with a bottle of sloe gin stolen from Peter’s parents and a joint in my purse. At the very least, names would certainly be taken and parents called.

Peter insisted on driving with the headlights off. That made the deserted graveyard even scarier in the rain. Not only could we not see far ahead of the car, but the streets curved and looped amongst the shadowy grave markers. The little car’s tires kept slipping as Peter coaxed it up the inclines.

Freaked out by the lack of traction, Peter turned onto a dirt maintenance road. The soft loam was swollen with days of rain. The car tires made a plaintive sound as they drowned.

Aw, shit, Peter groaned. He threw the car into reverse and dug the tires in deeper.

What are we going to do? I begged. I envisioned myself in my prom dress, drenched with rain, wading through the mud in my open-toed pumps, creeping onto the caretaker’s porch to ask to borrow the phone to call my sleeping parents to rescue me. I would be grounded forever.

Peter refused to abandon his aunt’s car. Come on, Paul. Pete shouldered open his door and stepped out into the rain. We’ll push it out.

The rain slicked his dark hair into his eyes as he looked back at me.