The part that wasn't our fault was that the convention planners — trying, in all good faith, to give us a showcase slot — scheduled us against no other programming, for right after the Friday night social with the open bar, around 10:15 or so. We actually went on around 11, once we found Dennis, who'd located a whole quadrant of the HWA to chat WWF with. The voice-alteration box finally exploded. The fog machine malfunctioned. The show can't possibly have been as interminable as I remember. It definitely was not light out when we got done. But if the boundlessly peppy Nancy Holder, self-professed author of 78 novels, tells you afterward that she "whoo, got a little snoozy," well…
We went home chastened. Determined. And buoyed by some convention notices — from someone who'd apparently dreamed a better performance than we gave — suggesting that we really were on to something.
Darkness Rising; Exit Dennis
We had better plans for Rolling Dark 2, starting with the name — Darkness Rising — which was all Dennis'. This time, we were going to write original stories, with a traveling theme. We were going to enlist different backing musicians — real musicians, who could play multiple chords — at each new gig, giving the whole thing that improvisatory feel we very much wanted. We got the ever-industrious Paul Miller, publisher of Earthling Publications, to agree to print chapbooks featuring the new stories. Three weeks from opening day of year two, Dennis quit.
It's tempting, here — it's what any self-respecting wrestling fan would do, surely — to construct some mythology at this point. Some Shani Davis-Chad Hedrick meltdown, ending with Dennis slamming Pete and Glen's heads together, leaping atop a table in triumph, and fleeing down the 405. The truth has much more to do with the endless, tedious, frequently terrifying mechanics of trying to make a living as a writer. Dennis had deadlines. Work he had to get done, that he was actually sure was going to pay him. The dates didn't work.
Traveling and reading with Dennis has been and will remain a profound privilege, and I very much hope to have the chance to do it again. Once Pete and I got over the disappointment, we started calling around. We realized quickly that there were more than a few writers who'd either heard about what we were doing already, or who liked the idea once we told them. Within days, we had a whole host of new talent lined up, each for separate gigs, so that every single night really would be a unique and unrepeatable event. The 2005 Darkness Rising tour wound up featuring readings by Robert Masello, Nancy Holder, Tamara Thorne, Robert Morrish, and Michael Blumlein, along with Pete and me.
Another student of mine, Kat Hartson, painted an eerie, gigantic backdrop of a street corner, a single street lamp, a shadowy figure in a hat. We nailed a couple cans to a board and created stage-headlights, came up with a frame story about a broken-down car, a nervous driver waiting in a dead neighborhood and telling himself stories while hoping for someone to come. We bought hats, and my wife told me I looked "weirdly almost sexy" for the first time in a while. We got a better fog machine, a bag of fall leaves, and left the voice-alteration box home.
The Dark would roll once more.
Snapshots, 2005
God, the music, first of all. Rex Flowers and Jonas Yip, my longtime friends and bandmates/droning dreamily and hypnotically in Glendale, at the first show in which the Rolling Dark actually had to turn people away. Prog-rock pounders Pegasus all but blowing us offstage but stirring a responsive crowd in a tent outside Lou's Records in San Diego. Amar Chaudry's playful stylings at the wonderfully welcoming Capitola Book Cafe near Santa Cruz. The amazing Mr. Kleffel's eerie vocal & electronics ensemble, Pets Gone Wild (featuring his longtime companions Dana Massie and Jinny Royer), amping up the ambience as we kicked off the Dusk-til-Dawn Fest at Borderlands.
The sights, too: the old guy at Mystery and Imagination who got an accidental, full-face blast of the new fog, nearly passed out, and stayed anyway. Robert Morrish and his unannounced, full-cast, old-time radio-style blitz through his story, "Junkyard of the Damned" at the Capitola Book Cafe. Michael Blumlein showing up in mask-to-boots fetish costume and alarming even the jaded Market Street denizens for his inspired reading of "Greedy for Kisses" at Borderlands. The highlight of that night, we thought, at least until store owner Alan Beatts took the mic, thanked us, then put the entire RDR to shame with a dazzlingly dry, funny, and devastating reading of the best Richard Laymon story I've ever encountered.
On the way through the mountains to Santa Cruz, my parents called on my cell phone to report that my grandmother had died. This was not unexpected. She was 94, cancer-riddled, under hospice care. She'd been sedated into deep sleep because of encroaching panic, and I'd said my goodbyes before we left. Pete sat quietly, said nothing when I pulled off once more into Pacheco Park. He lurked near the park entrance while I walked up the grassy hill to the lone tree once more. I'm pretty sure I'll stop there every year, now. Then I went back, thanked Pete for his intuitive quiet, and we rolled on into Santa Cruz.
In wondrous and surprising and uncomfortable and inspiring ways, the Rolling Darkness Revue had officially gotten away from us. It's itself, now, I think. It's coming anywhere that will have it this October. What will happen once it gets there is anyone's guess.
11:55
Best thing about being the one to write this article, of course, is that I get to be the guy with the watch. With the one more story.
A couple years ago, at the ConDor Conference in San Diego, I wound up on a panel with noted science fiction author David Brin. Mr. Brin was nothing if not provocative, issuing pronouncements — some of them genuinely thoughtful — about pretty much anything anyone in the room cared to talk about. When he realized he was on the panel with a couple of ghost story writers, he proceeded cheerfully to dismiss pretty much the entire field. Science fiction writers were forward-thinking, essentially optimistic, rooted in the real. Horror writers, he claimed, were romantic pessimists, in love with and mired in a peculiar nostalgia for a time when there was more we did not know.
To me, there are few human actions more forward-thinking, optimistic, and profoundly rooted in authentic human experience than staring down the inevitable end and transforming it into story. It's true, I don't remember a whole lot about the performances immediately following my grandmother's death. But I will forever weave the last moments I shared with her in this world into the story of the Rising Rolling Dark, and I will always be happy to visit her there.
Years ago, I took my folklorist-wife to the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro, Tennessee. Nostalgia everywhere that weekend, no question about it. Stories a little squeaky-clean and bloodless as a lot, for me. Except for Saturday night — by far the best-attended night of the entire event — when what seemed the entire population of the eastern half of the state gathered on the riverbanks to hear ghost stories told from the pavilion. There was something so joyful, at once fundamentally universal and supremely solitary in that experience, and it only became more joyful as the moon got higher and the chill more ferocious and the stories darker.
As long as we can continue to pull it off — as long as the dates line up, and the economics at least provide the illusion of working out, and the musicians and painters and guest stars keep popping up and contributing their fabulous ideas, and the listeners keep coming — Pete and I have pretty much committed ourselves, now. This year, maybe we'll have the privilege of bringing the river to you.