true life that inspired writing My Megalomania At Midnight

My Megalomania at Midnight afterwards

Afterward-2dec 2006 2:30am done with the first editing process.

            Many many weeks ago if you would have typed my name, Honea Byrne, on your internet Google image bar it would have taken you to a graveyard’s tombstone of some distant relatives of mine. Rising from the proverbial ‘dead’ in all appropriateness is a chief mantra of the story. How appropriate it was; for we on and from the Coast will forever be changed.  Even more so, appropriate due to the fact that the story started off loosely based on Chuck and I taking pics from town. One of the scenes was indeed from a graveyard located on 28^th street in Long Beach.

            I started this story in May 2005 with real scenarios and loosely based ones; they were my hangout spots. Most of which would, unknown to my conscious mind, not be the same at the ending of writing the story. In particularly, there’s the billiard hall Jim Bob’s. That opened back up around mid-November under new owner ship and is now called Skeeter’s. Used to have a homely, underground feel; now it’s more like a ‘we’re too old to not know we’re in a Frat anymore’ crowd. With its peach colored clean walls. However, something extremely different had to be done because three persons who signed their names to the wall in the corner died during the storm; had to paint the walls for moral reasons.

Prologue “13’s my lucky number, to you it means stay inside. Black cat walking down my path, no reason to run and hide.”-Mike Ness of Social Distortion from their song “Bad Luck.”

On Friday the 13^th May 2005-after I walked the stage, to receive my BS in Special Education, Charles drove me to see a Highway that I have longed to see ever since I first heard Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” album. And Charles had a few months back re-introduced me to the urban legend of Robert Johnson selling his soul at the crossroads. So right away I just had to find out what Clarksdale and Highway 61 were all about. Well, a primary motivation was to see if I could capture what ever it was that Johnson had captured. I just knew that if I could I could be ‘The Man’ too.

We drove for probably (probly’) about 5 hours and into the dawning of 14^th we had turned off of 61 and I saw a sign for Midnight. I just had to see the one roaded town that has a gin mill; aptly dubbed “Midnight Gin Company.” And just having that image in my Mind I was prompted to create a story that followed with an incident of Charles wanting to take pictures for our newly created website. As desperate as I am to convince you that I am the sh*t, and Charles with his logics, a term came to me that I remembered from a college professor at Perkinston (Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College) in the Early 90’s. That term being ‘Megalomania’-that’s a disease associated with royal incest around the pre-WWI era-definition is one that thinks they are god.

Never imagined a storm would come that would “rock you like a Hurricane”-Scorpions. I stayed for the duration of 12 hours in a house North of the Tracks, a lil’ over a mile from the beach. That storm being Katrina-and the story prior to the storm was following what many would call a series of coincidences, others wiser would call it ‘Synchronicity’. Me, I call it ‘Universal Architecture’; as I ripped myself in half giving power to a weaker

co-depently driven self with an X fed up with my psychosis. Events in which my day job secrete identity got fired from my first teaching job(lost that post Katrina). Ended up working gutting houses that had all sorts of fruity colors of mole on the walls, then I was a garbage man through out Waveland and the Bay St. Louis area. Ended traveling back up that Highway, all the way up to Clarksdale, after making a fateful phone call from a school that I had taught at in the inner city of Gulfport (May 2006).

Shortly, there after, I met this groovy chick in Morgan Freeman’s bar ‘Ground Zero’ one night while I was in the middle of a scheme to write country lyrics with the theme of what happens when forever ends (when that chick who I thought would love me forever dumped me). My mission was to get revenge on the ‘ex’ through a scheme to publish cheesy love songs to Nashville. I was thinking “Hey why not, after all the masses love bubble gummed pop putrid hacked love joints?” and once I’d be famous she’d want me back but by that time…. The groovy chick asked me what I lost in the Hurricane? And all I could think of was “Yea, I lost my girlfriend.” We ended up hanging out and it lead somehow to me meeting world renown blues musicians and even-

On Friday the 13, October 2006 I starred in a Tennessee Williams play ‘The Strangest Type of Romance’ alongside Broadway actor/director Joel Vig and Broadway actress Tammy Grimes. Of course, I was thinking “Oh yea, the gods are in my favor.” Not just from the number ‘13’. No, it was from the fact that two weeks prior I posed in front of a sign at Tennessee Williams Park depicting the young Williams by his minister grandfather. The park is located within walking distance of my ‘groovy chick’s’ house. This was going to be a pic that I’d send back to Gulfport of me on the curtails of world renown writers. The beginning of ‘a new aura.’

Really, to the logical mind, all it was was a case of good luck. Her mother is a local journalist, Panny Mayfield. She has and is responsible for bringing much of the ‘Blues’ to Clarksdale. And she was in charge of the Tennessee Williams Festival. One evening after we ate together she asked me if I’d be the ‘hunk’ they needed for the part of the boxer. A strangest type of romance indeed, in which I was donned in my grey tank top shirt, tattoos exposed, among them a skull inside a heart, and cussing the all g’ds and hells, all inside the auditorium of a junior high school. Thought, I had indeed ‘arrived’ after wards at Morgan Freeman’s fancy dancy restaurant, there in my tank top with the retired older ladies and men telling me how great I was.

It just so happened that Mr. Vig needed a guitarist to play the scores for the play.  Therefore, I called up a guy who teaches me templates of the blues at the Blues Museum in Clarksdale. He goes by the name Daddy Rich. I think it would be safe for me to assume that this led him performing live for a world renown rocker Robert Plant (Led Zepplin.) In the 90’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page visited Clarksdale and hence came Page and Plant’s “Walking through Clarksdale” album. My girl’s mom made acquaintance with Mr. Plant and they became great friends. Mr. Plant came through Clarksdale while doing vocals with a country singer in a studio in Memphis. He wanted to see a fife band and a blues musician play at Red’s Juke Joint.

On the night of October 30, I was taking my writers pose at  the bar, head tilted a bit and rested on my hand, with eyes peering waiting to have a freeing vision, when I saw Robert Plant hanging with Morgan Freeman and my girl’s mom. I was also fortunate to drive Robert Plant and his personal assistant back to their bed and breakfast at Moon Lake. He is a very charming fellow. A relevant piece of conversation, for this story that was much to my chagrin, was when he informed that Robert Johnson was not possessed by the devil. He got so great on guitar by practicing for many weeks after getting heckled off of stage. During this time he disappeared and was practicing alone. Mr. Plant even went far enough to tell me that there is no devil. I asked him how was he so sure Johnson didn’t meet the devil and he told me that he was given his information by Johnson’s friends and relatives who he met many years ago.

When I first told Charles on the phone that I had met Mr. Plant over the phone he was cynical and sarcastic with a comment like, “Don’t be one of those guys who knows a lot of famous people and that’s what they claim as fame.” However, he also suggested that I could have told Mr. Plant about our website. He and I both agreed that that would be of bad taste.

Charles for the past few years has become ‘cynical’, concrete in logical pessimism. Around January of 2003 he set up a website in which he wanted to have fun with. It features him, me, and, a cat we know in Tennessee, Heath. Through out my urges to get recognized, in late 2003, I got a contact with Dee Rimbaud out of the UK with AA independent press. It was much to his pleasure. As Charles claims, “No one even knows about our site.” I got us links in mid Mississippi, and from a local boy we went to school with by the name of Redd. And for a very brief time we had a submission page up that featured the writings from a poet in the UK, Chris Barnes. Recently, we’ve added the link of Daddy Rich. I’m utilizing the site as another place to promote myself. To my pleasure it’s been effective enough that when some web surfer types Honea Byrne in their Google search engine I’m the one of the first hit for our site www. Multidementional.com. It is hear say to say that I’ve spread our label a bit. Perhaps, Charles would have done the footwork I’ve done. My intention is to get the recognition and get fans through queries and word of mouth, even got a small hand full of close friends that I send my new found music cuts to. Figured that would get better chances of play then sending my music tp labels. Especially, while I’m nurturing my music style. My means have at times, more than I care to admit, been very eccentric. Some would even consider manic. That’s what I believe should be done. If you want some thing go get it philosophy. Why not? Others have been doing it. So what, if they from other parts of the country and other parts of the world. Charles does cultivate his creativity to a universal user friendliness with his music, while I prefer to get the fan with pure chaos. It’s sloppy sometimes but it’s real. And it has maintained for a good while now. Charles is my logical side that urges me to clean up the rawness to make it more universal. This is the way our relationship is. He stays very diligent, looking for pure skill, not poppy threads that do in fact appeal to the mass. However that doesn’t mean it has authenticity if it has mass appeal. It is a great theme in the story line of our chemistry of duality. As well as the theme of what if we were artistically freed. My attempt is for my reader to be enlightened to the fact that they can live out their dreams in a healthy manner. But, if I am going to claim myself as a writer I should be legit enough to make financial gains from it while indeed keeping a level of artistic freedom. And such an artistic freedom does entail a responsibility to my fan to leave them with hope. Not trash. I ask you, “How much of the world is polluted by what they have ingested from an artist?” The examples to me are countless and hopefully not infinite.

Regardless, Charles and I have been creatively intertwined since early child hood. Specifically, back in the 80’s era of Heavy Metal music and Rap music I was always the fan of Rap. We’d go driving out and have the car stereo on a compromise of two for two. He’d play two Heavy Metal songs and I’d play two rap songs. For example, two songs by satanic Metal band King Diamond followed with Ice-T. This was back in the day when everybody in high school seemed to want to be a guitar god. Boyz’ grew their hair long, played in garages, played in rented out sheds, and played at bars, etcetra, etcetra, and wooed the chicks (teen age groupies). Many of them burned out on drugs and alcohol and are resting in the same cemetery as my kin. Others got the groupies pregnant had kids and did the shotgun weddings (inevitably ending in divorce) got real jobs and never picked up their axes(guitars) again. A select few stuck around and still jam in various music projects. Some of these few, tragically, are burned out living an existence of fantasy that they just are about to have that one hit jam that’s gonna’ set them free of their miserable existence. Hence, they ingest so many substances that they become trapped in a personalized psychosis of grandeur. Perhaps, some who sold their souls to a devil to become stars don’t become anything but schizoids. And I am truly blessed to have been a part of seeing all such cases by being around Charles. This sort of “Teen Age Waste Land”-The Who, is what I used for the scene of the man meat locker of burn-outs in the story; a primary ingredient for the context of Megalomania.

            The basic theorem of the psychotic power hungry one (artist) is believing that they can control a supernatural level of events too closely correlated to be considered coincidental; ‘a level of events that some would call synchronicity.’ But I prefer to call this ‘Universal Archetecture.’ I believe that it is indeed possible to exist on a level of knowing about a supernatural events that are closely correlated subconsciously. This subconscious level does influence events in the physical world. One example of this is life imitating fiction. Indeed this story has been a case of life imitating fiction by the relation between the characters. 

            In the story I also use breaks in the story that are enclosed in boxes. These ‘breaks’ are meant to match the plots of what mood is to come in the story in the pages to come. They were written at times when my ideas were blank.

            I also make cross reverences to another story I wrote many months earlier called

2 to 1. It worked because its subplot was about a storm coming to the Gulf Coast (Singing River or Screaming River as referred to in 2 to 1.)

            In retrospect, I know that writing this story and experiencing the events that followed, only a few were mentioned, has very much enlightened my days. One of which, was picking my axe (guitar) again and really learning how to play it. I bought my Kramer Guitar in South Korea back in 2001 and became too secular to take interest in it. Since writing the story I have learned riffs that I never thought I would learn. Even started recording my own music.  I do look forward to where my creativity takes me from here.

P.S.-infinitely bound by a true F.A.I.T.H. (For all in their hell) (For all in their heaven) in my Loh’rd-evident by variations of the Serenity prayer done throughout ‘my megalomania’-indeed keeps me grounded (from going over the edge, escaping reality).