MiSTed: The Drake Raft Field Trip (4/8)
Chris Mayfield
[Continued from part 3]
>
>I studied it awhile. "Nope-- these skulls and crossbones are pretty
>cool though. How'd you get out?"
>
>"Read the poem, ya cretin."
>
>There was a poem on it,
Crow: For those of you who've forgotten what you've just read, let's
recap.
> and I read it out loud:
>
>Oh, the wicked witch murdered Uncle Walt,
Tom: She was unhappy how Snow White got all the screen time.
>Confessed her guilt-ridden soul in a book,
>She made the murder look like his own fault,
>She made it look like his own life he took.
Crow: So now it's an Agatha Christie retread.
Tom: That, and it's redundant.
>All to head the poetry department,
>Vengeance upon mankind for his past sins,
>And now Princeton is locked in a ferment,
Tom: Ah ah ahh! That's an identity, not a true rhyme.
Mike: You're critiquing their poetry at this stage?
Tom: It's all I left.
>Here's where this fugitive's story begins.
Crow: Drake Raft, searching for the one armed feminist who killed the
Western Canon.
>Brother, wear my jeans jacket in good health,
>I stole the manuscript of her confession,
>Alive, I stalk the Princeton woods with stealth,
Tom: Does hunting trees really require much stealth?
>I must feign this death to save Walt's vision.
>For when she learned her book my eyes did see,
Crow: And my sentences the subjects I did convolute.
>She stole my sonnets, planned to murder me.
Mike: This is like every bad piece of juvenile fiction rolled into one
huge incomprehensible sum.
>
>"Like Drake's still alive?"
>
>"Hell yeah he is! Plus I found this."
Mike: It's a geode!
> Cliff held up one of those bank
>receipts. "It's dated three days after he jumped off the bridge." I'd
>never seen Cliff so totally up.
Tom: Death in the family always perks him right up.
> "Dude, when I saw this, I knew I had to
>bust out of that office. So check out how I got past Janovic--
Mike: [Lamar Burton] Check out "How I Got Past Janovic" at your local
library because reading opens up a world of excitement!
> the cops
>came in to bust Jeremihah and Travance, but just then some executive
>lawyer dude from Rap'n'Rape Records showed up-- you know, the ones they
>just got signed by, just to make sure the arrest went down right, so
>that they'd get to be on TV and stuff, and get an authentic clip of
>them gettin' cuffs slapped on 'em for their video,
Crow: That'll make those pasty prepubescent redneck white boys look like
hardened criminals.
Tom: Me an' Bubba is down with th' street.
> but still be out on
>time for their show, and he hit Dehaven and Janovic and the cops up
>with some hundred dollars bills, and like the cops handcuffed 'em, and
>they were gonna handcuff me, but Dehaven told 'em I wasn't part of the
>band, and he and Janovic told me to scat and forget what I saw."
Tom: Then why were they chasing him? It doesn't make any sense! It
doesn't make any sense...[weeps]
Mike: Buck up Tommy. It's almost, um, half over.
Tom: [weeps harder]
>
>"Cool!"
>
>"Drake's alive!" He hugged me,
Crow: Bad touch.
> lifting me off the ground, and twirling
>me around. "C'mon, the rain's gonna start. I wanna get back home to
>look for clues in his stuff, before we go up there."
Tom: Up where?
>
>"Up where?"
Tom: D'oh!
> I called after him, hopping the same rocks he used as I
>'crossed Water Strider creek. "We?" About a month back there'd been a
>note on this bridge-- this one cool suspension bridge
Mike: Remember: November 11 is Tacoma Narrows Bridge Awareness Day.
Thank you.
> over a gorge out
>in these woods at Princeton . It'd been Drake's suicide note,
Tom: The only good thing he ever wrote.
Mike: Now _that's_ dark.
Crow: After dark?
Tom: Or Faker d'Art.
> only
>they'd never found the body, dragging the lake, and nothing'd ever
>floated up.
Crow: Everything that lowers must submerge.
> But nobody'd seen hide nor hair of him since. And the
>note'd been in his handwriting and all.
Mike: And it was written in his signature burnt umber crayon.
> Cliff'd showed it to me.
>
>It was sprinklin' a bit by the time we made it back to Cliff's house
>over on Ghimghoul road, and the wind was totally ragin' and rippin' off
>the leaves and branches,
Crow: [elderly falsetto] Dorothy? Dorothy!
> and you'd almost think it was fall, 'cept that
>the leaves were all a bright June green. There was that warm, new rain
>misty smell
Mike: As well as cinnamon, pine, and new car smells.
> risin' up from the first few drops hittin' the pavement
>which'd been heatin' up all day long in the sun. That was some pretty
>freaky stuff about his brother.
>
>Cliff's was the prettiest and best house around, pretty much,
Tom: It was the grandest of all!
> I'd have
>to say-- not that it was huge or had a lot of moshing going on in the
>front yard or anything, but it was sizable, all right, like brick and
>painted white, with a stone fence the whole way around.
Crow: Something there is that does not like a fence.
> That afternoon
>the way it stood out against the huge grey sky made it look like it'd
>been polished with Turtle Wax. Stone fences are cool.
Crow: Well, that's because of their low thermal conductivity which when
you touch them--
[Mike sets his hand on Crow and stops him]
> At any rate, it
>was a castle compared to the shack I lived in over in Carroboro. You
>see, Cliff's dad worked for the main church at the top of the hill--
>fort God,
Tom: With the canon manning the cannon.
> while my dad worked for the Lighthouse church away out in
>Chatham county-- the one for all the black people. My dad's also like
>the assistant to the head groundskeeper, at the Robert Lee Country
>Club,
Mike: He gets all the turf he can eat for free!
> but I still don't think he hauled it in anywhere close to what
>Cliff's dad did. He'd just been voted Chapel Hill's Confederate son for
>the second year in a row.
Tom: He does a good job keeping down the darkies.
Mike: One of these days someone's not going to be able to tell you're
joking, and then where will you be?
Tom: Still stuck up here on this satellite with you.
>
>Anyways, there was Tammy, Cliff's girlfriend, or something,
Crow: We refuse to relegate her the status of human being.
> sitting out
>on a rocking chair on the porch in her spandex and stuff,
Mike: Arrangement in Lycra and Black No. 1.
> listening to
>her Sony Sportman. It was cool 'cause all the other chairs were rockin'
>along with her in the wind, like all her ghost friends were there. She
>was always in spandex.
Crow: They've found my dream girl!
>
>"Hey y'all, ready to go running?" She was trying to tie her hair back
>'cause it was blowing all over the place. She was really athletic--
>she's on the wrestling team at Chapel Hill High.
Tom: Sign me up!
>
>"You'll get hit by lightning."
Crow: Good.
>
>"Oh C'mon! Just around, with me and Megan. There's a tornado watch
>too."
Crow: Let's jog in the face of imminent death!
>
>"Can't." Cliff said, like walking by her, and she grabbed his hand.
>
>"Well look, I know you've probably got fifty million plans,
Mike: For fifty million Frenchmen.
> but you've
>got to come on over to Jennifer's tonight. You too, Timber." She smiled
>at me. "Especially you, Timber-- I think you'll want to go. Christy
>said some thing about a dream about you, I think."
Mike: [falsetto] She woke up screaming and drenched in her own vomit.
Bots: Ewww!
> She had a pretty
>cool smile-- Tammy did, but her hair was kind of red.
Crow: Vee khan zee by zee author's rejection of red headed girls zat he
has a fear of zee female zycle of menstruation.
Mike: Thank you, Crow.
>
>"All right, cool."
>
>"Catch you there," Cliff said. "We've gotta go."
Mike: Timber has to go walkies.
>
>"Mark it on the calendar, guys. Megan's dad just harvested his latest
>crop."
Tom: Cotton for all!
> A blue flash ignited the sky, and the thunder rolled on overhead
>like a fleet of freight trains.
Mike: [singing] Get on the Glory Train...
>
>"All right," Cliff nodded, "We're there."
>
>We went on down to the basement where they had all of Drake's stuff and
>began opening all the boxes and trunks and everything.
Tom: Wow! A lava lamp! And a whole bunch of Star Wars figures! Cool!
> There were
>clothes, and more clothes, and all of it nice and Polo and button-down
>stuff, and everything, and then there were books, and more books-- all
>of them like huge with names I could barely even read, like
Mike: J.B.
Tom: S.
Crow: The Persecution and Assassination of Jean Paul Marat as Performed
by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the
Marquis de Sade.
Mike: Crow, I think you missed the point.
> "Multi-bi-
>cultural D ifferential Inner Calculus for Scientists and Engineers and
>Postmodern Intuitivists,"
Mike: They argue that the soul is an _integral_ part of man.
Bots: Boo!
> or something, and there were a bunch of stuff
>about that Indian Shake-a-spear guy, too, who like Ms. Jackson had just
>banned from diversity studies, 'cause they'd discovered his words were
>meaningless.
>
>"That's weird," Cliff said.
>
>"What's weird?"
Mike: That last paragraph didn't make any sense.
>
>"There's like not one notebook or anything anywhere."
>
>"Yeah?"
>
>"Well either his roommates forgot to put them in, didn't want to put
>them in, or they weren't there to be put in."
Crow: Or the Freemasons and the Jews have suppressed them!
>
>"Yeah?"
Tom: Someone hit Timber. He's stuck again.
Crow: Oh! Me! Me!
>
>"Either way, we're gonna find out."
>
>Cliff slid his guitar out from under the couch, where he kept it hid
>away, and plugged it in to his brother's amp- he cranked it up.
Mike: We're going to communicate with the ghost of Jimi Hendrix. He'll
tell us.
>
>"Dude, you tryin' to get grounded?"
Tom: If so, step into this pool of water over here.
>
>"Naww, he's at a wedding rehearsal, or something. Grab Drake's guitar,
>there-- I've got to teach you this new riff for the chorus of Death's
>Bride."
Crow: Okay, it goes: A flat, A flat, A flat, A flat, A flat...
>
>Drake's guitar was a thousand dollar Strat, and I could feel every cent
>in it-- the thing was though, he only ever played classical stuff, I
>mean old classical stuff, with sheet music.
Tom: Ah, the evils of Switched On Bach.
> He was really good,
>although I'd never seen him-- I'd just heard him, 'cause he never
>played out in the public anywhere. Cliff's riff was a piece with a lot
>of cool classical stuff in it,
Tom: [Nigel] I'm very influenced by Mozart and Bach.
Mike: What's this piece called?
Tom: Lick My Love Pump.
> and we jammed for a b it, and lost
>ourselves in it, like you always do, and I totally found a way into the
>lead, and Cliff took over the rhythm--
Tom: And beat it dead.
> it was a cool riff, especially
>for Cliff-- he said it was a funeral march. But of course you know it
>that it turned out his dad had forgotten his wedding sermon at home,
Mike: I've heard of being left at the alter, but never by the preacher.
> or
>something, so when he heard us whaling away in the basement, down he
>came,
Mike: [Dad] Boys, have you been blubber hunting down here?
> and we didn't even see him like 'til he'd yanked the plug to the
>amp out of the wall. Well Cliff was busted, as his dad'd thought he'd
>sold the guitar, and everything.
Crow: Yes! Drake's dead and _everything_ must go!
>
>"Son, it seems you lack a refined ear, in addition to honesty." He was
>pretty tall,
Tom: Cliff's dad has a glandular problem.
> and kind of looked like Clint Eastwood with a beard-- you
>know the type.
Mike: Paranoid schizophrenic?
>
>"Get over it dad." Cliff kind of sighed under his breath, not looking
>up.
>
>"Don't try me, boy." His dad walked up and grabbed hold of his ear.
Mike: And it snapped clean off.
Crow: [Cliff] Aaaaaaahh! Aaaarrrrrraaaaaaahh!!!
Tom: [Dad] Oh, jeez, sorry! I didn't mean...
>"You told me you ridded yourself of this instrument, boy. And as for
>you,"
All: Boy.
> he looked at me,
Mike: [Dad] You make me sick.
> "I'll give you ten seconds to get your uninvited
>influence beyond the boundaries of these walls."
>
>"Call me later, dude." Cliff nodded to me.
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[Continued in part 5]