Dropping one late tonight but I wanted to get this story out of me. Let me know if you dig this and I always appreciate your comments and shares. If you really dig it consider supporting here or via Venmo or PayPal: @DamianRucci to help get my ass to Manchester, New Hampshire tomorrow. Anyway into the story
I’ve always lived with a simple philosophy— if a street preacher or an eccentric character of any kind stops to talk to me than I will give them the time. This has always been my way and it’s because of this I have always been surrounded by strange and magnificent characters throughout my life whether they be strange street prophets or wayward criminals hiding on the Henry Hudson Trail. I carry it in my heart that I am a man of the Earth and no one is above or below me and anyone can be a long lost friend. I’ve been on the hunt looking for the American hero and I know if they are still out there they aren’t sitting in a cubicle or tucked away in a university but they would be out there tucked away in some far reaching place. With almost a decade of travel under my belt I’ve found heroes and hustlers and pure souls glowing so bright on midwestern street corners like matchsticks burning brilliant only to smolder out into ash and I’ve found saints. I want to tell you about the saint that I carry the closest to my heart.
To tell this story we have to go all the way back to 2018— before the Renaissance when I was just 24 years old and newly on the road. I had started and ran a poetry show Poetry in the Port in Keyport and after 3 years and growing to its zenith I closed it down and headed out to live at an arts residency in Belle, Missouri— a thousand miles away from home two hours south of St Louis so rural that the neighboring towns didn’t even know it existed. It was so alien to what I had known growing up on the Bayshore in New Jersey. A deep red town in a deep red part of Missouri so far from the ocean that the night before I left, I laid on the beach on acid scared to break some strange symbiotic relationship I had never living more than a mile from the Atlantic. I didn’t know how I could fall asleep without the sound of the waves or of the trains blaring through Jersey’s coastal towns— but I learned quick to sleep to the sound of hundreds of cows singing cow songs in the surrounding farm land.
I was in one of the studios and I shared a kitchen with an artist who lived in the art gallery and tried to make sense of my new surroundings by walking up and down Alvarado Avenue and avoiding the strange man I was cohabitating — an artist of some renown who when I first met him smoked me up and gave me mala beads for hours we would talk about art and philosophy about magick and Carl Yung. I read books with him on Sufism and Christian mysticism and I had an inkling he was strange— he drank a gallon of milk a day with maple syrup. Cup by cup. But hey we’re all a bit strange right? He would preach for hours and I let him talk ‘cause what else was I doing? Dude went into some long winded rant about being God and not the “we’re all god experiencing itself bruh” like I am literally a deity type rant. I was smoking a bowl watching this bloating famous artist smash cups of maple milk and proclaim his divine right until his laptop wouldn’t connect with the wifi. So this lactose demigod smashed his laptop on the linoleum floor of the art gallery kitchen and I always had a problem with divine folks not having patience.
I left the gallery and smoked a cigarette leaving whatever lunacy was transpiring behind the double glass doors when a white pickup truck jammed on its break throwing dust and smoke up like a cartoon when a small wiry man with a trucker hat, a handful of stubborn teeth and piercing blue eyes leaned out the truck. I thought there was a problem.
“You one of them art boys?” The man hollered in a mix between a bark and a coyote howl. I told him I was. “Well I work for the mother fucker, my wife just died. Heading to the funeral. Gonna be a real rager. You in?”
I had never heard of a funeral be compared to a party and I was caught off guard and than I found myself riding with this man eight miles out of town towards his property to go to his wife’s funeral. It was at that moment that I met Crazy Mark. A character that has appeared widely in poetry across the Midwest and for good reason. He is a legendary figure— there are strange cosmic situations that clump the right atoms in the right ways and produce a bad mother fucker. He only sped doing ninety miles an hour until every fiber in his truck shook and convulsed on the country road. Crazy Mark just never saw any sense in going slow— HE HAD PLACES TO BE.
Five minutes into the ride and he turned to me and said “Don’t ever bring home a spider monkey, promise me, if any hillbilly mother fucker offers you a spider monkey you say NO”
The very thing had, happened to him. Maries County is a few lettered interstates and a spiderweb of country roads that go just about anywhere, everywhere and no where and he was riding chasing sunset rocks showering behind his truck all gas no brakes when he saw a man shoulder deep in the Gasconade River and he pulled over to help the man.
“I’m just trying to drown this here spider monkey” The man said holding the struggling monkey in his hand.
“Don’t drown the mother fucker, give him to me. I’ll give you 40 bucks for him” Then he drove home with the spider monkey feeling like he saved the animal’s life and maybe found a new friend. But after it healed, the monkey turned heel and started beating up on him— hiding in cabinets and ambushing him. “it was like the Vietcong I swear to Christ I was fighting for my fucking life so after a week I couldn’t take it no more so I grabbed the mother fucker by the scruff of his neck threw him in my truck and drove right back over to that hillbillies house to get my forty bucks back”
“What happened to the monkey?”
“Oh the monkey? He drowned it”
I was only beginning to learn that Crazy Mark was full of stories and we made it to the funeral. A whole bunch of family and friends and artists awkwardly swayed around and he mowed a heart in the middle of his property where they would bury the urn and when she was in he called the funeral to order “now that she is done and buried. Let’s get fucked up like she would have wanted us to” and then dozens of joints, pipes, bongs, and other strange smoking contraptions materialized and we smoked and talked about life and death and laughed and watched the moon grow all amber and hazy and if you would have told me it was from all of the pot smoke I would have believed you.
Standing just over five feet tall but you would swear he towers up through the heavens the way he walks around— a man of purpose and the purpose is smiling and sitting on his porch to watch the hundred hummingbirds in some quantum entanglement buzzing and moving and dancing all at once while we trade stories that pay off in laughter that rings out through the foothills like the timbre of some old folk song. Crazy Mark could be curt and straight forward scaring pedestrians and rich kids with his ozark hollers and laughter that broke out into machine gun fire parred with his hand clapping the lighter on the table for good measure. If Diogenes came back today and found himself stumbling around rural Missouri with his lamp he’d stop looking for an honest man the second he stumbled down the two country roads to Crazy Mark’s shrine.
His home was not just a home by any measure. More of a temple to some pantheon he must have encountered in his travels between the Everglades of Florida and Missouri— it was in Florida that he did that “crack epidemic right” and grabbed a purple moth out of the air and threw it into a pipe and smoked it waking up naked out in the swamps surrounded by alligators. Somewhere in those trials he found an aesthetic and built his life around it. A huge property filled with all sorts of lights and knickknacks like fossils of innocent placed around his yard. The walkways are made from see through cases filled with all sorts of strange paraphernalia like some road side attraction captured in time.
Crazy Mark claims he has 3 million lights and if the weather is just right, they say you can even see it from Mars. I don’t know who says that but who am I to get in the way of a good story? Whenever I come through Missouri I bring a group of artists with me to the Shrine on the Hill, that citadel of temporal beauty, the only light from this spinning rock that you can even see from the heavens.
I’ve never met a man who carries his scars as well as Saint Crazy Mark— who takes the torrential rain from any angry god and builds oases for the wanderers, who takes stubborn ozark foothills and crafts shrines for the weary and the lost. Who has lost so much but eyes are as pure as snow always looking to love.
I can only hope to be lucky enough to make it to his age with the same poise. Saint Crazy Mark is a beacon of man— an ozark howler, a renaissance man and our Missouri grandpa.
If you ever come with me on a tour I’ll be sure to bring you there. There’s a lot more to say but I just wanted to introduce y’all. Talk soon.
Let me know if you dig this and I always appreciate your comments and shares. If you really dig it consider supporting here or via Venmo or PayPal: @DamianRucci to help get my ass to Manchester, New Hampshire tomorrow. Anyway into the story
Cool piece!
you should write a novel