This is me wondering if I have told this story here before. It is a story about my friend Russell, a person I knew for decades, & a person with whom I lived for maybe two years. He didn't like living with me, & moved out after a time. I decided to stay in the duplex we had shared, having a few more roommates until I lived there alone for my last year. During that entire time, inspired by the shenanigans of Joe Orton in the film Prick Up Your Ears, I starting pasting stuff all over one wall & had it mostly filled (I left the bottom three feet clear because my cat had a habit of tearing things I put there off) before I left the place after five years.
When I wrote a few years back on this blog about this place, I mentioned that wall. In this post you can see a composite of what the finished product looked like.
The memory I'm going to relate - about me & my friend Russell - might not be related to that wall but I could swear it is. I loved to find stuff on the street & stick it on that wall. One day I found a flyer that read "Last Chance To Evolve Beyond Human." (Yes, this was the inspiration for the bit on last week's show.) Russell & I loved weird stuff like that & we decided to attend the lecture or whatever that was coming up.
It was at the Hilton across the river, across Congress from the Austin American-Statesman building. I seem to remember it being a warm evening in autumn. Russell had a car, so he drove us. We found a place to park & we wandered into the hotel, the flyer in hand, looking for the room where the lecture was.
We found the room among the suite of rooms that had been separated by baffles/fake walls, only there was some professional meeting going on in there. We were a little confused, but as we turned, two young men dressed quite preppily approached us & asked if we were interested in the thing we came to see. We said yes, & they explained that they had lost their reservation, but would be meeting again in another place in a couple of days. This other place was not in Austin, but rather in Pflugerville (which at the time was a smaller suburb which seemed a bit of a ways away), & it was a private residence. We took the information & went home, agreeing we were probably not going to drive forty-five minutes to someone else's house at night to be amused by what might have been a cult.
Spoiler alert! It was a cult. Here, from a very old website, is the text of the flyer.
Yes, the folks were from Heaven's Gate. Just two or three years later those preppy boys we met in a hotel in Austin would be dead. Or in a comet. Or both?
What the hell does that have to do with my vandalizing a rental property thirty years ago? I could swear I pasted that Last Chance To Evolve Beyond Human flyer on my wall. I can see it in my mind's eye when I look at the wall. But! I can't find it now. Can you?
At least it gave me this memory of my dear friend Russell, now three years gone. We were goofs but not goofy enough to fall for the Heaven's Gate stuff!
When I wrote a few years back on this blog about this place, I mentioned that wall. In this post you can see a composite of what the finished product looked like.
The memory I'm going to relate - about me & my friend Russell - might not be related to that wall but I could swear it is. I loved to find stuff on the street & stick it on that wall. One day I found a flyer that read "Last Chance To Evolve Beyond Human." (Yes, this was the inspiration for the bit on last week's show.) Russell & I loved weird stuff like that & we decided to attend the lecture or whatever that was coming up.
It was at the Hilton across the river, across Congress from the Austin American-Statesman building. I seem to remember it being a warm evening in autumn. Russell had a car, so he drove us. We found a place to park & we wandered into the hotel, the flyer in hand, looking for the room where the lecture was.
We found the room among the suite of rooms that had been separated by baffles/fake walls, only there was some professional meeting going on in there. We were a little confused, but as we turned, two young men dressed quite preppily approached us & asked if we were interested in the thing we came to see. We said yes, & they explained that they had lost their reservation, but would be meeting again in another place in a couple of days. This other place was not in Austin, but rather in Pflugerville (which at the time was a smaller suburb which seemed a bit of a ways away), & it was a private residence. We took the information & went home, agreeing we were probably not going to drive forty-five minutes to someone else's house at night to be amused by what might have been a cult.
Spoiler alert! It was a cult. Here, from a very old website, is the text of the flyer.
Yes, the folks were from Heaven's Gate. Just two or three years later those preppy boys we met in a hotel in Austin would be dead. Or in a comet. Or both?
What the hell does that have to do with my vandalizing a rental property thirty years ago? I could swear I pasted that Last Chance To Evolve Beyond Human flyer on my wall. I can see it in my mind's eye when I look at the wall. But! I can't find it now. Can you?
At least it gave me this memory of my dear friend Russell, now three years gone. We were goofs but not goofy enough to fall for the Heaven's Gate stuff!
