2: Attempts On My Life Story

 Stefan's first rejection letter

            On June 15, 1975, at my childhood home in Milton Ontario I commenced writing The Sunset Metaphors and The Yodeling Frog, my two autobiographies. Being 22 at the time, I had just relapsed to my parents' place from a musical career that was fizzling. I got laid off from my alleged day job. The first passage was written in the backyard amid the dandelions with the sun's blinding light on a blank page. It began with my first recollection, which hit me like a barrage of cherry bombs.
             There had been several attempts on my life…
story, starting with: Maxwell’s Wind-up Monkey Dance, an obscure fusion of yodeling frog and sunset metaphors. The second attempt, The Yodeling Frog and Other Atrocities began with the line: "The swimming limbs of shadows which leaped around the Yodeling Frog...."
           The third attempt was penned, by hand, oddly enough, into a blank book while I lived in a somewhat furtive manner, after a radical chain of events somewhat changed my life. If I had been a fugitive, an escaped convict, if I had just for the fun of it say, done something totally un-Canadian, something like cause the death of a hockey star by surreptitiously tying his skates together while he was in the penalty box — then I may have been forgiven by my folksinger friends. But I did something that was far more unforgivable and was consequently ostracized in their literary eyes. I'm not talking of doing covers of Gordon Lightfoot songs, which I admit, after the frying pan incident, are actually quite good songs, worthy of being covered.
             To understand fully, though I speak figuratively of those fugitive years, you have to read on... The "furtive works" disappeared in a suitcase with twenty handwritten journals under mysterious circumstances. I was told that the suitcase, which was kept in unguarded condition at a storage facility outside of Irving, Texas, "May have been stolen by thieves thinking there were power tools inside." The suitcase had no latch, and I dare say that thieves would not be so inept as to steal 21 volumes of latent literature thinking they were "power tools".

             The handwritten version may have been relegated to a designated dustbin had not a photocopy of it survive with my friend, Ellen, who was by chance with missionaries in Honduras. She returned the manuscript, which was stuck together after having being dropped overtly into the river during a photo op with Contras in canoes. Ellen presented me with the muddied manuscript, after an accident left my T11 and T12 vertebrae mildly crushed, and we pried it apart. As I recall she handed it to me under cover of darkness at a screening of The Beverly Hills Cop.

             Junkyard in the Sky, my fifth incursion into literary airspace was attempted towards the end of 1987 after I went to Toronto with my own nuclear entourage.

             My sister gave me the original rough work, which had festered in a trunk at that dilapidated shack the old man so elegantly whitewashed. This "short lived version" begins with me in a sublime position on an operating table telling "the story" to the Doctor as he removes a birthmark from an important part of my anatomy. Removal of said birthmark from my neck with a tunable dye laser was like a facelift, and thus enabled me to chance being seen once again in the public eye. The theme of my fading escapades was now to reconcile my past from a secular point of view, being that major episodes were like stages of a rocket that had propelled me to higher planes in sudden bursts of glory. "The stages served their purpose, but what of these propagated boosters, the mere relics of rusty rockets that mire the ocean floor."
             I do not under any circumstances picture myself a satellite orbiting the earth with only the occasional thrust here and there to keep me on course. The so-called "penultimate and lesser lofty version" begins: "It was dawn when Sam Green tossed a banana peel and boards a southbound Bathurst Street car." Sadly the epic ends with the realization that the banana peel had been left up in the air for a long time, beyond the willing suspension of disbelief.
             The story, then called "Symphony in A Flat Tire" was in the hard drive of the IBM clone, which was stolen from a basement during a moving dispute. Fortunately I had made a home movie of the manuscript as it spurted out of the printer like an endless roll of paper, and was able to scan it into readable form.
             Finally, the last attempt began just after my forty-fourth birthday. "On Saint Valentine's Day 1994 I had a near death experience when my kidneys failed due to Cellulitis. I was allegedly working as a wedding photographer at the time, under the umbrella of a larger nuclear entourage, destined to die in intensive care."
             A miraculous recovery dispelled rumors of my eminent death, as a hundred or so people prayed for me in earnest. On that drafty deathbed I could almost reach out and touch Elvis's gold lamé jacket. But a voice reached out and admonished me to go back and, "Let the worm out of the apple." I came to and began reciting Soliloquy of A Worm Inside A Candy Apple, to the nurse.

             Now I'm not sure if Elvis told me to let the worm out of the apple or get the frog out of the snake. Ultimately the latter won out and the "real" story begins, just after the "Blessing" in The Frog and the Snake: "When I was a young boy, I saw a snake with a large lump in its body crossing the road. It got halfway across when a car ran over it, severing it in two. It was a summer day, in front of my grandmother’s house in Field, Ontario; the cicadas were buzzing and the lumber mill was roaring in the distance as logs were debarked and dropped back in the river. I watched as the snake made a few last movements, then saw the lump begin to move. A frog covered in slime slowly made its way out and hopped away." Or maybe what Elvis told me was the ending, which is the worm getting out of the apple and subjecting the world to his art.