The following is the contribution to the book that was released last week called Margaret In the book is the scrapbook I found, this essay by me, an essay by Jason Webley, a CD with 12 songs, all the words to all the songs the musicians used and some other stuff This project has been a dream come true Telling this story is like a dream Crazy serendipity to make it all work and the mysteries all getting solved are just crazy

In Jason's essay and at the show this Saturday night at the Castro, the mysteries will be revealed How the scrapbook got in the dumpster How Margaret died And more These secrets are also in the book

You can see this show on Saturday at the Castro Theatre, tickets are here: http://www eventbrite com/e/margaret-tickets-13935091233 or you can get them at the door for $25 (no fee)

We just did this show in Seattle last Friday This week it's Portland on Thursday, Eugene on Friday, SF on Saturday and LA on Sunday

In the show me and Jason take turns telling the story, and it's interspurced with musicians who have put Margarets' poetry to their original music Lots of strings and stuff Pretty heavy stuff It's kinda dark and introspective Super real Not a joke or some thrown together variety show

It's beautiful and cruel and complicated and more than any of us bargained for

Please come

A series of bizarre decisions created an odd ecology of circumstance that resulted in me discovering a most interesting story at the bottom of a garbage bin

It was just sitting there, among the other contents of a house that a crew of workers had cleared out I wasn’t really interested in the garbage, per se I needed to make some space in the dumpster, because my van was full of trash that someone paid me money to bring to the dump I’d already spent the money on something else, and was looking for a place to relieve my royal blue Dodge Tradesman 200 of its burden The furniture was just thrown in, wasn’t packed very tightly It could be re-packed and my stuff would fit The furniture was actually okay I could probably sell some of it at the flea market on Sunday I knew a guy who sold stuff there—he let me drop off junk and gave me half of the money he made selling it

The wind was howling, as it does on the top of a hill at three in the morning Driving around lost, listening to Billy Idle and looking for empty dumpsters an hour after the Chameleon closed If I could jettison the trash, I could sleep in the van lying down instead of sitting up in the driver’s seat I have no idea how I got to Wool Street in Bernal Heights, just driving around looking for new construction sites with dumpsters Really, I kinda had no idea how I got to San Francisco in the first place Just lost in the world, always looking for something Finding the queerest things, things that I never knew I was looking for until I found them

After I unloaded all the furniture onto the sidewalk (not easy!), I was sweaty I was already in the dumpster, so I just sat down out of the wind to light a cigarette It was dark in there on a cloudy, moonless night, and the light from my lighter grew brighter as I sucked I noticed a bunch of stuff on the floor of the dumpster Drawers from a built-in One of them had a candle in it So I lit that candle, and used it to look at the stuff Nowadays, you would have used your phone, but by that fragile candlelight, I discovered the scrapbook that started all this

Finding that beautiful, hand-tooled leather scrapbook with that candle was a moment of divine connection Flipping through the pages of Margaret’s life by candlelight, reading her poetry, seeing her photos, lost in the world, safe for the moment with half a pack of cigarettes and the prospect of a vessel to dump some trash so I could have my van back Crouched in a dumpster, I felt like I was the luckiest man alive

Her poems touched me in a way that poems never had before Especially the one called “Patches ” The poem was ripped out of a real published book, the page yellow with age The photos of her pregnant in the hospital after a car wreck, and then seeing the next page with birth announcements of her children Yes! It was a roller coaster ride A few pages later, there she is with her husband having dinner with FDR It all boggled my brain I mean, the Chemical Warfare School? Rear Admiral? All I knew was that it made me feel alive to think about it It made me feel like I didn’t know anything about life, and the world felt new again

The scrapbook itself was of a quality I’d never before seen Did I mention that the leather was tooled? By hand! Richly made A family heirloom Some family, somewhere I wanted to find them Give it to them It wasn’t garbage Well, technically garbage is just an idea, and I could go on about that, but… this definitely wasn’t garbage

I offloaded my trash into the dumpster, took some of the furniture (I still have a small table), and scurried off into the night looking for a place to park and sleep that wasn’t directly under a street lamp

*

It was a hot August day in 2003 at the Box Shop I was re-wiring the trailer lights in my pickup truck to lend to Lightning, so he could tow his Airstream to Burning Man I was drinking a bottle of Vitamin Water Someone in the shop was mixing copper sulfate with water and brushing it on copper to make that greenish patina They were mixing it in a plastic Vitamin Water bottle You know where this is going…

The chemical burns on my liver made me slow for the better part of a year For a few more years, I would go through phases of slowness Poison control didn’t really know what to do with me because there was never a case of anyone drinking copper sulfate and surviving Somewhere in there it also came out that I had Hep C My labs were shitty I felt bad The stress of a bad breakup and a biopsy showing severe scarring on my liver combined with my showman’s tendency towards histrionics—I was convinced that the end was nigh

My will was easy to make Tools go to John Law, vehicles go to Billy the Junkman, porn goes to Jim Mason, my dog Dammit would go to Dannygirl, etc… but when it came to that scrapbook, I didn’t know what to do

By this time, I’d had the thing for ten years The book moved with me from living in the van, to living in storage spaces, to my dad’s garage, to LA when I lived in the warehouse without the boss knowing, it went on tour with the circus, I had it behind the bar at the Odeon for a while… I showed it to everyone Carefully reading their faces and being completely unable to answer a single question when they were done Dates, guests, performers I was hosting, people around the campfire, roommates, the plumber… they all saw the book My line was always, “there’s someone I’d like you to meet ”

Of all my possessions, this was one of the most valuable And I was afraid that when I died it would just end up in a dumpster again Sure, people looked at it with interest But did they really understand why it was so important, why it was such a precious thing? Did they get it? It was a real dilemma I was convinced that I was about to keel over at any time and I had no clue what I was supposed to do with the fucking scrapbook of Margaret Rucker

I didn’t trust any single person with it So I decided to trust everyone

I did what I usually do when presented with a problem—I turned it into a show I had Jascha scan some of the photos and documents from the book and turn them into a PowerPoint presentation with Linda Robertson orating (you know, reading the poems, news clippings and stuff) because she has a great British accent I rented 12 Galaxies, invited local musicians Faun Fables and circus starlet Baby Dee to play, and asked Miriam the aerialist to perform while I introduced the audience to Margaret Three hundred people came out on a rainy Sunday night to hear the haunting sounds of Faun Fables and the funeral dirges of Baby Dee Most people were confused about the “scrapbook” part of the show; they really didn’t know what to make of my memorial for this total stranger Miriam sat on her trapeze reading the newspaper as I started talking about the van and the dumpster She let some of the pages drop out of the newspaper into the crowd—all the pages were from the obituaries She did some poses: feats of strength and endurance, her muscles strong and sure… I talked about garbage

And then I showed the slideshow They watched it, and I watched them Curious at first, they invested By the time they got to the telegraph tape (when in your life have you seen an actual telegraph tape?) Everybody’s heard of telegrams They’re in old song lyrics and movies all the time But have you ever actually looked at one, let alone held the fragile thin paper tape in your hand? I hadn’t I’m fairly certain I never will again they were sold I remember watching their crushed, stunned faces when they heard the details of Justus’ death—the looks of betrayal, the head shaking, that confounded hands-over-the-mouth thing I thought people only did in horror movies And I couldn’t answer a single question It was all just a giant mystery

After the slideshow, I left the scrapbook on the front of the stage, encouraging people to take one of the photos or newspaper clippings home with them They were reluctant at first, but the bands started playing, and slowly they started coming forward Someone took a photo, someone took a poem The scrapbook slowly emptied to souvenir hunters People kept taking little pieces of Margaret away until finally everything was gone, and one guy even took away the empty leather scrapbook itself

Sure, this gesture could be seen as a spoiled showman’s dramathon, the cheap cliché that death is just a kind of letting go… but really, when is there a good time to confront death? Do you block out a couple hours on your calendar a few months out to stand in front of the mirror and try death on to see how it fits? Doing a show is the only tool I have to deal with anything If I’m going through something, I do a show about it Wanna change legislation? Do a show Need a device to insult a former friend who has graduated to a vapid talking head for a pseudo-spiritual mega-corporation? Do a show Wanna impress a girl? Take her to a formal brunch at the junkyard (Formal Brunk!) with fifty people in tuxedos and evening gowns drinking champagne and eating crumpets Turn the problem into a show Indeed, it seems that if everyone did this, there would be need of very few laws…

That show that night was perfect Powerful And I connected the idea of this precious life to the people I felt like I did the right thing, at that time

But I didn’t scan everything in the scrapbook Just some of it To make for, like, a four-minute slide show The scrapbook is now gone, as is most of that record of Margaret Rucker Never in a million years did I think I would ever solve the mysteries raised by that book, let alone meet someone from the Rucker family, or I would have never done that

But at the time, I did what seemed to be absolutely right—giving her away Piece by piece Because sharing this story was the most generous thing I could think of to do My relationship to the dry, cracking pages and the dust in the crevices of that leather tome was totally unique It was something you couldn’t buy at a store But as important as that book had been to me for years, I let it go

*

Some people say that I am a man of uncommon understanding

I have with great intention and marked proclivity embraced an odd lifestyle It’s outside of traditional commerce, mostly Sure, you can ding me for it if you want, but it was an experiment And I think it was a good one You see, I chose “story” as my currency instead of money And that has made me a very rich man

When I found Margaret’s scrapbook it was like striking gold It wasn’t the only time this has happened I once inherited A C Funes’ collection of Hawaiian records (an archivist, with the largest collection of Hawaiian recordings probably ever), I was entrusted with the cremated remains of a man named Ulysses who along with his dying wishes was found in the trunk of a 1977 Ford Granada, and there’s my collection of diaries I got buying abandoned storage lockers, or the assortment of tortured and soiled GG Allin microphones I saved from being discarded All gold You can see the gold in the prizes I give away at Lost Vegas, or in the piles of crap that I drag out to Lake Lodoga every year so that hundreds of people can make boats out of bullshit I could go on and on point is, it started with that scrapbook Margaret was first, and to be honest, without finding her, I don’t know that I would have even been able to see any of these others I see them now Everywher e

And as amazing as that discovery was, there was actually something bigger and subtler that I found in that dumpster by dim candlelight while trying to shelter myself from the wind so I could light a cigarette I found this—everything is a story These stories abound They surround us They permeate us constantly From the right perspective, every problem is an adventure Every reaction is an opportunity for change Any change a chance at discovery Every discovery a wild-eyed magic trick

Maybe you will find a story in some unlikely place, somewhere Or maybe you could dig through a million more dumpsters and just get kitchen scraps, junk mail, and kids’ toys up to your elbows forever Maybe

There’s a lot of gold getting tossed out all the time I still squirm in my chair when I think about the things that get thrown away every day Like, it literally makes me squirm to think about it Like a squirming squirmer at a squirm-a-thon

I mean, we are talking about garbage here The great indefinable resource from which I’ve built my empire And I’ve actually come to believe very strongly that there simply is no such thing as garbage Garbage doesn’t exist This whole story is proof

Don’t believe me? OK How about the lost and found box at the café? That stuff isn’t garbage Right? But it gets thrown away because it doesn’t have an owner Or what about a two-liter soda bottle? I mean, those are garbage, right? It’s not like you can build an oceangoing vessel out of a few hundred of them and traverse the Adriatic Sea Right? Or what if I throw this $100 bill in the wastepaper basket?

What if a precious one-of-a-kind family heirloom is thrown in a dumpster because the guy who owned it moved to San Francisco, was unmarried, died young, and was estranged or shunned by his family? What if that were true?

And what if somehow that confusing action gives a broken young man who digs through dumpsters in the small hours the metric to an aesthetic that will come to define him?

There have been dark times in my life, but I always found a way to the light again It was dark in the years after I chugged that bottle of copper sulfate When Chuck died When NYC ended And it was dark at the bottom of that dumpster But when you live a charmed life, as I do, at these darkest moments, you always get handed a candle

Finding this amazing artifact changed something inside me Enough that I’ve now shown it to thousands and thousands of other people Maybe it has changed some of them too I guess that’s a vindication for a lifetime spent digging around in dumpsters in the dark Because if you can find this fascinating reliquary in the bottom of a dumpster, then anything is possible And because making a show out of a life tossed in a garbage bin is my way of shedding light on dark things

You never know when a defining moment of your life is happening In the dark, it's hard to tell the junk from the gold

But when you find a candle, light it

On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 10:39 PM, chickenjohn chickenjohn@chickenjohn.com wrote: I dont' have the final piece that I wrote for the book in text form, only PDF Do you have that you can send to me?

chicken