I first met Derby Luncheon (a.k.a. Dave Faunce) after he
called the college radio show, La Casa de Pulgas, that I hosted with my friend Marcos Frommer on WBOR in Brunswick, Maine. He told us he was a fan and wanted to know
if we would come by his studio apartment to hang out. Marcos and I had been
doing the show for a couple of years and it had evolved into a hovering,
swimming stew of old cowboy records that would sink into West African guitar music,
carom into Schoenberg, squish into Brian Eno and finally blossom into some of
the stuff coming out on independent rock labels at that very fertile time in
the late 80s: Bongwater, Eugene Chadbourne & Meat Puppets. Saccharine Trust,
Die Kreuzen & Hüsker Dü – artists whose alluring melodies where often cloaked in distortion and galloping tempos. Derby sounded open and friendly on the phone,
but I could tell by the way commented on the music we were playing that he was a
thoughtful guy.
We took my Chevy Caprice down Maine Street and turned down a
little road that ran along the Penobscot River. We parked and walked up the
staircase that rose along the side of the tall wooden house and knocked on his
door. Derby let us in and immediately we could hear sounds punk and ritualistic
soaring out of the speakers beyond the door. Our host was slightly shorter than
average height with sandy blonde hair and a sturdy French peasant build. There were
empty beer bottles standing here and there and incense holders littered with
ash languishing throughout the L-shaped unit. Derby was at that stage of drunkenness
where one becomes temporarily blissfully happy. He was warm and complimentary
of our show, but I noticed he would always keep a pocket of energy for himself
– a very smart tactic for an artist of mild means. When the manic alcohol high
would dip a little bit, it was possible to sense melancholy in him.
He told us he worked as a sous chef at a restaurant in town
for a guy named Jimbo and that he was in some sort of a heartbreaking
relationship with a tall and rangy college student named Kate, who was a
dishwasher at the restaurant. I immediately liked Derby; we were able to talk
fluidly together, our interests and temperaments clearly complementary. We
spoke of music, which Derby was passionate about and he seemed to gravitate
towards bands that had an element of the mystic about them, such as Psychic TV
and Swans. There were items of esoterica here and there in the apartment – a
tome by Alistair Crowley, say, and Bob Black’s anarchist classic, The
Abolition of Work. Perhaps to give Marcos and me some context to his pursuits,
Derby mentioned that he had been a born-again Christian for eight years and was
now just a few years out of that particular region of extreme belief. Later, on
a drive up the Maine coast, Derby indicated to me the white wooden church on a
hill where he had been saved.
Derby moved from Brunswick to Portland, Maine in 1988, very
excited to try to land a job as a chef. However, the recession was already
taking hold and there were very few jobs available in Portland. He had to take
a position as a line cook for fairly low pay and he was also experiencing some
health issues that were interfering with his ability to do the job. By the way
he spoke about the job and his health issues, I could tell he was feeling
frustrated, down on himself and even somewhat ashamed of his situation.
In other ways, Derby was enjoying Portland. He was beginning
to make the acquaintance of some likeminded folks and was taking advantage of
the well curated video store down the street from his house, enjoying some of
Richard Kern’s hard-hitting cinematic shorts featuring a powerful and alluring
Lydia Lunch. And he began writing. He published a couple of very immersive
essays in the alternative monthly Head Cheese – published by the musician
Curtis Harvey – about tripping on psychedelic drugs. Beyond the reflections on
his own experiences with the drug, Derby referenced various pro-lysergic acid
philosophers, such as Timothy Leary and John Lilly. I thought the essays were
expertly written and I can still conjure the image of the newsprint broadside
with Derby’s text and illustrations of magic mushrooms in the margins. I’m
sorry to say that Derby’s essay was what got the magazine put out of business.
Apparently, several Portland area businesses refused to carry the magazine
after the issues recounting the drug trips… and that was the end of Head Cheese.I
moved to Portland from Brunswick, myself, in 1989 and was quite pleased to
begin hosting a midnight radio show with Derby at WMPG, the local college
station. He came up with the name, “Endolymphic Squish” and designed some
gorgeous posters featuring illustrations of tall, loping dinosaurs in spectral
light to promote the show.
By the relatively young age of thirty, Derby Luncheon had
developed a strong and recognizable voice as a writer. This is not really surprising.
Besides being a man who loved books and music, Derby also possessed a rather
unique personal history. When asked once by a journalist how he managed to
write such potent fiction and poetry, Charles Bukowski responded, “I was
blessed with a crappy life.” And there is an element of the “blessings” of a
crappy life when one considers Derby’s history. He certainly didn’t have an
easy life. From what I could learn, he grew up poor in Central Maine with his
mother and an alcoholic and abusive stepfather named Henry. Henry’s abuse of
Derby growing up was severe and he was still processing it when we met when Derby
was twenty-seven. Mercifully, there was progress on this front; he wrote
proudly in the one surviving journal I have by him that in a phone conversation,
he and Henry were able to “exchange words bordering on tenderness.” Derby
joined the born-again cult in high school and remained in it for several more
years, through a family move to Albany, New York. In Albany, Derby fell into a
vibrant local punk scene and became the lead singer and lyricist for a band. He
confessed that he became known for getting quite drunk and diving into the
crowd during shows. It was in Albany that Derby got exposed to important
influences, such as the ReSearch series of interview books published by V. Vale
and the work of ontological jester Robert Anton Wilson.
“Monotheism Is Cash” was written by Derby Luncheon and performed
once, at the Broadway Deli on Maine Street in Brunswick at a poetry night that Derby
organized. It was very gratifying to see him present the piece to a crowd of
about appreciative and perhaps somewhat scandalized people. Derby had an enigmatic
kind of charisma, sort of like Harry Dean Stanton crossed with Jello Biafra, as
well as a very sure and strong reading voice. That’s what the audience saw and
heard as he read such lines as:
“One God is science, the only
true knowledge, casting down imaginations
and bringing every thought into
captivity.”
In March 1990, I went to pick Derby up at the end of his
shift at the restaurant where he was working. Usually, he would come to the
front door and greet me wearing his cook’s whites. But on this evening, one of
his coworkers told me that he had been in an accident involving a motorcycle
and that they didn’t know what his condition was. I soon learned that Derby had
gone on a beer run with a friend, riding on the back of the friend’s motorcycle
without a helmet. Their motorcycle was struck by a car and he went flying into
a concrete barrier, injuring his head. Derby was in a coma for three months.
Finally, he was removed from the machines that were helping him to breathe and
he died at the age of thirty. On the morning of his final day on Earth, I had a
dream in which he came to me to tell me that he was okay – that he only had
headaches now and then and he couldn’t drink alcohol anymore. In the dream, I
was overjoyed. He said to me, “Thank you for coming to visit me in the
hospital. That’s how I knew you really loved me.” Then he took my hand, and a
bright vertical beam of light shot out of our joined hands. I will always view
that experience as Derby’s visiting me to reassure me and to say goodbye.
Derby Luncheon left us this explosive, inspiring and
wonderfully heretical poem. May it broaden your gaze and open you up to finding
your own experience of the divine, as Derby hoped it would.
Dan Hanrahan. Chicago. September 15, 2019
MONOTHEISM IS CASH
The Gallup poll asks, “Do you believe in God?” (Big G), but
no other question. Even in jail, Wiccans cannot observe their days and nights
while thieves and murderers may go to church.
“Is it not written, ‘Ye are gods.’?”– Jesus
Before we were “Judeo Christian” (as if that is ever one
thing), we were Greek and often Barbarian. Yet the past 200 years have hardly
been the apex of spiritual evolution. One god unites empires, perhaps, while it
narrows the soul, dualizes it, blinds it to many Aspects and Attributes.
One god has stolen the throne, robbed all others of their
light.
One god is a jealous god, a hungry god, eating his children,
killing his fathers.
For reasons of State.
One god marches with lightning and thunder, heavy boots.
One guy is hydrogen splitting, the Aten bomb.
One God is a lawgiver. He demands obedience. Love him or
else.
One God is science, the only true knowledge, casting down
imaginations
and bringing every thought into captivity.
“Monotheism (is) the rigid consequence of the doctrine of
one normal human being.”
– F. Nietzsche
Children, let me tell you a secret:
Beneath the
earth, way down by the fiery core, titanic monsters roar,
stoking the
burning heart of the world. They do nothing but drink fire
and eat stone day and night, never
resting from their excess. When they retch,
their
bellies push up mountains, raise continents, grind the land,
pull worlds apart. So it is with
the gods, who rise with their Olympus. They,
too, are children of Groaning.
“For there are gods many and there are lords many.”– St.
Paul
Gods and Goddesses do not need Idols,
for they are likened unto us so we may know them
and so know ourselves
Is this self-worship or is this self-realization?
Is this anarchy or is it enlightenment?
Can we make our way to the One without
stopping to humbly try on the Faces?
“Well, then, I contradict myself. I contain multitudes.”– W.
Whitman
Legions. They’ve been demonized, repressed, unrecognized
like in a funhouse mirror, sold for a ticket.
“Welcome, folks, to the Idol Mart, here on the Home Shopping
Network.
May I have your credit card number, please?”
A new God puts them to work, a new trinity.
“Better an Old Demon than a New God” – album title
Philip K Dick, a science fiction author of some great
talent,
was hit for days with light blindness, Messages from
somewhere else,
wnd recognized that the Empire had never truly died, that
Rome and
Byzantium are still at war, that the sign of the fish was
the enemy of God.
The fish was forgotten, laid aside for the Eagle. Christ
returned to the desert.
In the Age of Aquarius, the fish discover water.
“No story is the whole story. It takes many stories to tell
the whole story,
yet the whole is known always and only through the many.”–
D. L. Miller
We get the idea of democracy from the Greeks,
whose councils of freemen, like ours, served
elites and factions. A democratic people does not
cry out with one voice, “We will have us a king.”
Elvis was king and they killed him. John is dead.
Some individuals find refuge in traditions, find
in them channels for their polymorphous selves:
“One can be polymorphous without being perverse,” they say.
“A frightful sphere whose center is everywhere and whose
circumference is nowhere.”– Corpus Hermeticum, quoted by
Blaise Pascal
There are gods for the moon and the sun, the
stars and the earth beneath us, gods for the seasons
and the changing winds, gods of fate and war and love,
gods of hearth and the gods of the lively woods,
sleek new gods, gods of better times,
gods of shadow or silk,
gods of rage, gods of bright mornings.
To each we bow in their due, knowing that they made us.
To some we sacrifice, desiring their pleasure.
We put faces on them, call them names.
And so we seek godhood.
“Where are you going with all your realities? I am
reality!”– Butthole Surfers
The integrated one knows his place,
defends his place, spends his life establishing
this fact. And what else is life for?
(“There, you’ve asked THE QUESTION)!
There is a time for less wholeness.
A Fragmentation allows for breadth
an acceptance of the dark with the light
and all that springs from the great Yawning
which lies at the heart of all things.
“The Map is not the Territory”
Daughter of Chaos, sister Discordia
has found her place (which is Everywhen).
Infoglut, Culture Clash, Future Shock,
she makes her nest in this post-mod village,
laying two eggs: Possibility and Despair.
The old cosmologies saw the universe as a
perfect sphere, totally closed, one center.
I see it as swirls within swirls,
a fractal star, like the ship
which brought Superman to earth.
“The opposite of a great Truth is another great Truth.” Niels
Bohr, pioneer of subatomic physics.
THX-1138 is the name of one of the best
little-known films ever made, a collaborative
effort of George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola.
It is the “Sien und Zeit,” the “Ninth Symphony”
of American film making.
LSD-25 was one of the best
things to happen for humanity in the 20th
Century.
Yes, casualties happen.
Remember the reptiles.
I can say things like this because
I live in perhaps the first polytheistic
republic in 600 years. We are a tolerant
people. We’ve seen a high city
with many gates.
“Behold, I show you a mystery: we shall not all sleep, but
we shall all be changed.”
Einstein was wrong about the dice, of course,
But he’d take comfort in knowing they’re loaded.
Snake Eyes.
Derby Luncheon, 1988
