by Jim Jepps
I wrote my favourite zine on a snake. I took it to Zine Club, arriving ten minutes late just so I could be certain everyone would be there for my grand entrance. I hurled my zine through the door and slammed it shut, jamming a chair under the handle so no one could get out while I shrieked hysterically.
It turns out that it’s quite hard to read a zine when it’s written on a snake. It’s always wriggling and squiggling. Also they mainly had their eyes shut as they climbed the furniture in terror – unable to flee through the window as we were three floors up. They could have made the effort to appreciate the work I’d put in, but no, they couldn’t even do that.
Some people.
I started seeing ghosts around the same time that my mind was going. It was an irritating coincidence because I found articulating what I’d seen more difficult at that time what with the shaking, the repetition and the nervous twitch I developed that I still have to this day.
While I accept that printing zines on live snakes is a logistical nightmare for any decent sized print run I do not accept that this was a good reason to expel me from Zine Club.
Expunged, deleted, erased from the canon and then blasted from that cannon into a wall of shame. It hurt.
I used that pain to make a better zine. I carved out my words, using a crafting knife, into a block of frozen kidneys. I then poured water over it, put it in the freezer (over the peas, under the pizza) and hey presto three days later I peeled away my zine cube. But it doesn’t stop there.
I then put the ice into my nightly bottle of gin, drank my zine down with a flourish and in the morning pissed that zine back onto the kidneys and refreezed the lot. I called it volume two.
While I forget the actual content or intent of this process I do now reluctantly accept that it was an inspired work of genius yet to be equalled. Zine Club, of course, felt threatened and distressed to receive my zine and refused, once again, to readmit me.
I sympathise to a degree. The narrative was unstructured and by the time they unwrapped the parcel the kidneys had begun to reek. They did not see my work at its best. I’m still bitter, naturally.
The first ghost to visit me was the spirit of my first photocopier. I’d barely mastered potato printing and lemon juice invisible ink at the time so the ability to reproduce in this way was akin to magic. After five faithful years of service it finally petered out, so we wheeled it into the middle of Hatfield Forest and buried it in a shallow grave.
I said a few words to mark the occasion. I’m sure they were suitably solemn and then we filled in the hole and drank ourselves into a stupor – waking in a tangled heap at daybreak.
It was a sad occasion.
We’d intended to consummate the ground with demonic dancing and foul acts of debauchery – but in those days I only drank sherry and by the end of the bottle I was in no fit condition for even a mild amount of debauching – that would have to come later.
The second ghost that visited me was of an ink jet print I was briefly acquainted with in the eighties. In a fit of pique I drank its ink and launched it from the window where it smashed into the top deck of a passing bus.
I regretted it immediately as the whole office shared this printer and my boss described this as “the final straw” despite the fact that I had never been made aware of any previous straws. I find this quite typical.
The third ghost to visit me was the spectral remains of a hand cranked mimeograph machine. Four of us secretly hauled it to the top of the Post Office Tower, which at the time was the tallest building in London, if not Europe.
We did unspeakable things to it. We produced fliers which we allowed to dry by letting them float off the tower into space. Down, down they floated to the unsuspecting masses. Ungrateful sods.
When we finished I proposed we hurl the machine to Earth – from this height it would produce a suitably bold full stop.
Frank still owed his Dad money for the machine and insisted we get more than one use out of it. This kind of equivocation was typical of the eighties – a decade whose revolutionary zeal has been over-hyped to say the least.
When I was released I began to write poetry on the nature of free will. I had to. I chuckle now to think of the conservative nature of the structure, stanzas, pretentiously unconventional punctuation and sometimes they even rhymed. The shame of it.
The problem with tattooing your zine is that the inking needle does not come with a spell checker. Thank goodness I didn’t have it done on myself. I still see him in the town centre sometimes. He looks frayed at the edges and, frankly, glum. Thank the heavens he has my words to comfort him. At least he has that.
I wonder if Frank ever had them removed. He certainly was not happy when he awoke to discover a discourse on death finely etched around his neck like a “cut here” mark on a coupon. I tell you that his Adam’s apple was a piece of difficult terrain that took me as long as the rest of it put together. You have to do these things right.
Ludicrously Frank had claimed hurling a two stone chunk of metal off the Post Office Tower would be unethical. “What if someone is killed?” he squeaked, the wind whipping what was a fine head of hair. These days he is forced to wear a hat.
“What if someone is not killed and they go on to compose, for example, a philosophical jazz concoction, inflicting the world with the kind of cultural barbarity that we have seen quite enough of thank you very much? What then?” He would not listen. “It is our duty comrade to obliterate this existentialist threat. After all you only regret the things you do not do, not the things that you do.”
Frank was of a different opinion. I’m glad I do not have to live with his conscience, that’s all I’m saying.
I saw Frank in Poundland the other day. As I raised my hand to hail him, calling out “Great hat!” he was caught by one of those impulses we all have and ran from the shop screaming. I admire the fact that he lives in the moment, abandoning his wife and child right there in aisle three.
Some of my less successful zines include the cheese rolling incident, the time I tried to compose a sonnet in bricks and the symposium where I annihilated the Over Head Projector with illegally bought fireworks. What does not kill us makes us stronger is one of the stupid things they say isn’t it?
Speaking only for myself I take every failure as an affront. Those bricks were harvested at great personal cost with a stolen wrecking ball applied to The Old Crown’s front porch. There was no better use for those materials in my opinion but Big Stan begged to differ.
Zine Club renamed itself A5 Zine Club without a by your leave. It was so inconsiderate. The difficulty I had in cutting the Semtex down to the exact proportions. It was barely worth the effort in my opinion, but rules are rules after all. The look on their little faces when I deliver it through the window held into the undercarriage of my brand spanking new drone will make it all worth while.
It’s a whimsical parody of Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence. You know. The David Bowie film. He does some amazing hat wearing in it – it was Frank’s favourite as I recall.
The last ghost to visit me was the spirit of my future workstation. I was impressed by the way it blended technological innovation, smooth, rounded surfaces and blades. I look forward to acquiring such a beast. In the meantime I’d better fire up the drone, I don’t want to miss the start of Zine Club. Sorry, A5 Zine Club. My bad.