Pirates in the Heartland: The Mythology of S. Clay Wilson Vol. 1 - preview

THE MYTHOLOGY OF S. CLAY WILSON

VOLUME 1 PATRICK ROSENKRANZ

PIRATES IN THE HEARTLAND

PIRATES IN THE HEARTLAND

Introduction 4 CHAPTER ONE

Wilson’s Childhood 10 CHAPTER TWO

Higher Education 60 CHAPTER THREE

Lawrence, Kansas 138 CHAPTER FOUR

The Barbary Coast 174

I’ve always been digging pirates because what could be more opposite from a Nebraska cornfield than the fucking Caribbean with the bloodthirsty pirates boarding a big fat Spanish ship full of loot.

I always hankered for the ocean. It’s just a fantasy, a childhood fantasy. What kid didn’t want to play pirates, gangsters, or cowboys and Indians? Surrounded by all those cornfields and shit is why I moved to San Francisco to be next to the water.

Absolute fantasy and other worldliness. To escape the confines of Bible Belt Nebraska and cornfields. That is one of the reasons I draw pirates even to this very day.

— S. CLAY WILSON

JOHN WILLIAM WILSON AND IONE LYDIA LEWIS

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met in Fremont, Nebraska, when they both worked at the Pathfinder Hotel, and married in 1935 in Cozad, Nebraska. They moved to Lincoln and bought a small white bungalow with red shutters at 1730 North Twenty-Ninth Street, near Clinton School, where they raised their two children—Steven “Steve” Clay, born July 1941, and his sister, Linda Lee, who arrived in November 1946.

It was all very sedate—a Great Plains family in the bosom of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s postwar prosperity, where Middle American values were stressed, education and industry were encouraged, and manners were appreciated. Both parents worked to support the family, and the kids were expected to earn good grades at school and help around the house. They took vacations at a lake cabin in Minnesota for several summers,

WILSON’S CHILDHOO and the kids had a series of pets: dogs, cats, and Mabel the Parrot.

“We did have a quite normal childhood. We were well fed, well cared for, and very loved,” said Linda.

“My parents were not strict disciplinarians, and we were never beaten or anything. My dad commanded our respect, and we gave it to him. They were hardworking middle-class folks that had children later in life. Mom was thirty-one when Steve was born and thirty-six when I was born. Dad was six years older than her.”

John Wilson was a master machinist who worked for the Sidles Company in Lincoln for many years, and later at the University of Nebraska. He also had his own small workshop in the backyard, said Steve. “He ran a steel lathe and he could make anything, including crossbows which would punch a hole through solid marine plywood—THOK! He made furniture.

He made fuel pumps for Offenhausers. He was a whiz woodcrafter, steel lathe operator, and mechanic.”

Their mother worked for a time as a waitress at the Coney Island Café, but eventually she went back to school to learn a better trade and became a medical stenographer for orthopedic surgeon Doctor Phil Getscher. She also worked as a typist at the state mental hospital. “Mom worked as a medical stenographer in Lincoln, Nebraska’s state insane asylum,” said Steve.

“She was a little nutty herself. A real intense woman, God rest her soul. She was a whiz with algebra. She was very smart, though neurotic and weird. She’d get real upset; she was kind of nervous, and I take after her. I’m nervous all the time, and kind of depressed, off and on, just like Ma.” “Most definitely Steven inherited my mother’s nervous personality. I was the easygoing one and took after our dad,” said Linda. Her brother got very excited about holidays and parties, she recalled, especially Christmas

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and birthdays. “There was one Christmas, when I was three or four, when I got up and opened everybody’s presents before everybody got up. He was very pissed.

I can still remember that. He was yelling and crying.

‘You ruined it. You ruined it.’ When he became unglued he was quite a motor mouth.”

Their mom’s parents and grandparents were Midwestern farmers, but their dad came from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, the oldest of nine children born to Samuel James Wilson and Stella Mae (née Epperson) Wilson. In later years Steve often alluded to his hillbilly ancestors and to the lore and language they passed down to him. “Maybe I got my craftiness from Pa, some oblique path. ’Cause when I’m working sometimes with a magnifying glass, I remember seeing my pa doing real detailed work with micrometers. I was always fascinated, and I wish I’d learned the steel lathe.

He was always waiting for me to ask him, ‘please teach me how to run the steel lathe’ but, I don’t know, there’s some kind of friction between the son and the father.”

“Steve was my mother’s favored child, but I apparently was my father’s favored child,” said Linda. “I think he was disappointed that Steve didn’t play baseball or throw footballs or go fishing. I was like my dad’s son.

I was the one who went fishing with Dad and all this.

Steve wanted to hang around with his friends and do stuff like that. He separated himself from the family activities a lot. I was kind of Dad’s buddy and remember sneaking out of bed to watch some wrestling matches with Dad—he loved it! Mom was already in bed, so I was able to do this. He liked the company, I think.”

“Pa got me a .410 shotgun, and going pheasant-hunting with my hillbilly father was a pleasant memory,” said Steve. “I always felt real bonded. There was no talking. It was just silent walking and stalking.

Then I shot this bunny, and wait a minute. I don’t want to do this. It’s when I quit hunting, disappointing my father. Pheasants are one thing, but this bunny was blown apart. There was nothing left to eat—BLAM!” “I thought of one of Dad’s stories,” said Linda. “My dad had five sisters, and he said his mom used to make dresses from flour sacks for them that said ‘Mother’s Best’ on their butts. I’m not sure if it’s true, but Dad loved to tell that story.”

“And my uncle—Pa’s brother—Eli, he had his own flea market in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in a railroad terminal covered with vintage circus posters and honeycombed with used guns, coins, antiques, and all kinds of amazing stuff,” said Steve. “He had one son who was a rock ’n’ roll star. Everybody liked Mike because he ‘sounded just like a nigger’ when he sang. His brother was a gay male nurse, who had a palomino horse with a silver saddle and bridle; and when the horse died, they had him stuffed and had the horse with all the gear in the living room. I got my collecting gene from Uncle Eli. He would sell me any weapon. I had fucking

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Civil War cavalry sabers, matching flintlock pistols, percussion stuff, and war clubs from the Fiji Islands.

We played guns with real guns. Once I had to make a sandwich, and my cousin Mike said, ‘Here’s a knife.’

It was a Luftwaffe dagger for cutting up the hot dogs.”

“I remember playing Monopoly with Steve,” said Linda. “He was five and a half years older than me and always had Boardwalk and Park Place loaded with hotels, just waiting for me to land there. I remember defeat bringing me to tears on more than one occasion. We also enjoyed playing Scrabble with Mom. She was great.

She used many medical terms because of her profession.

Way back in the early days, my folks would have him watch me if they wanted to go out for an evening, and he’d make me read his cartoons over and over. By that time he was like twelve and I was like seven.”

Drawing was something he always did, he said.

He once asked his mother when they were going to get a TV set like the neighbors down the street. She threw him a pencil and told him to make his own pictures. This suggestion to use his own imagination encouraged him to create his own art rather than wait passively to be entertained. He drew greeting cards for birthdays and holidays, and designed coupon books for household chores as presents to be redeemed by his parents. He and his friends sketched out large tableaux of adventures and battles on big rolls of colored paper they rescued from the trash bins behind the local paper mill. Eventually he began to create fictional characters who appeared again and again in his stories. Linda became his focus group. “She used to be my proofreader, my sister, and she used to give me her input on them,” he said. “She used to tell me if they were funny or not.”

The inspiration that propelled him into the medium of funny books came thanks to his uncle Millard Townsend, who ran a drugstore in Ponca, Nebraska. When Townsend visited Lincoln, he brought along unsold magazines and comic books from his store with the covers ripped off; the covers were sent back to the distributors for credit. Steve’s first encounter with the EC comic book Piracy was his Damascus moment, and like Paul the Apostle, he was knocked for a loop. His desire to be a comic artist flamed on.

“The EC Comics were pivotal to me. When I saw my first EC Comic it was—dare I use the word nirvana or some kind of point of enlightenment—but when I saw that it blew my mind. My first one I remember distinctly was Reed Crandall’s ‘Blackbeard.’ I was going, fuck, what the hell is this? Here are these glorious comic strips done by all these different artists, all done in different styles. That built a fire in me and that’s what I was going to be. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it and I’m going to be a fucking cartoonist. I’m going to be one of these guys. That’s when I really decided for sure to start to become a cartoonist. So I started

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practicing, like practicing the piano, except a lot of people don’t want to practice the piano. They want to play the piano, but I wanted to be a cartoonist so I started drawing half a century ago, which is what I did.

It’s piled up.”

He drew nearly every day at or after school and often on weekends and vacations, filling one page after another with pencil drawings on both sides, working right up to the edge of the sheet. “I compulsively began to draw comic strips on pieces of typing paper of an elaborate fantasy world populated by my own cartoon characters: pirates, space warriors, soldiers, and little, twin, stunted vampire brothers named Ivan and Igor. These early characters were the predecessors of my later underground comix characters. During high school I became exposed to the work of Aubrey Beardsley, who has influenced my work heavily. I loved the sensual, art nouveau, calligraphic line quality and Orientalinfluenced, patterned composition of his work.”

His mother encouraged his interest in drawing, but she could recognize obsession when she saw it. “I’d be drawing on the front porch on summer days, and they’d be laying around like autumn leaves. I’d draw

one and throw it on the floor, draw another one and throw it on the floor. I was like a machine. Ma would say, ‘Would you do something with these comic strips?’ and sweep them off the porch.” He gathered them up and stacked them neatly in a footlocker near his bed.

“I was drawing all these black-and-white ones just to practice story line. They all have a moral, and they all have a beginning, middle, and end, and they’re all individual stories, and they’re all individually dated and titled, with a title on one side and a strip on the other.

I had different categories, so there’s [characters like] Kipton the Space Hero, and George and Sam McKuen, who were a detective team. There [were series like] War and its Men, Screech and Scowl, [and] a horror series [starring] Percy Puss and George. There’s a couple, Ivan and Igor, which were vampire bats, which are a kind of genesis from George, the squat little dog, with his little ears, and they turn into horns. So Ivan and Igor were twin brother vampire bats and the direct genesis of the Checkered Demon. Then there’s lots of pirate stuff because I was really flipped out with Piracy comics.”

He tried out different genres—science fiction, action/ adventure, horror, monster—even funny animals. In one

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strip, George the Dog thinks he’s an artist, and Percy Puss pays for the dog’s dissatisfactions. Many stories are revenge fantasies or mayhem caused by frustration. One can only imagine what was on the mind of young Steve Wilson when he came home from school on January 26, 1956, and drew the story of Bloody Berg, who locks his own troops in a dungeon with man-eating rats.

“It was something I did that I enjoyed doing. I’m going to draw comic strips because nobody bugs me when I’m drawing comic strips. Maybe one of these days I’ll become a fucking cartoonist and make a living at it, which I am.” This series of hundreds of comic pages have at least one glaring omission. There are no girls in them. “I didn’t know any girls to draw,” he said. “It was just men being evil to men. There were no women in them at all. Of course everybody is real horny when your sap is rising. I just took it out in having people kill each other. You don’t have to have a shrink analyzing why I did this.”

Wilson attended Lincoln High School, where he met his lifelong friend Don “Ace” Williams. “We were in the same art class together and he was always seeking attention back then,” said Williams. “He was very funny and we got to talking somehow and we struck up a little friendship. The first time we got together outside of school I went over to his place after school.

I think he wanted to show me some of his artwork and some other things he had there in his basement room. Back then a lot of houses had basements back in the Midwest and most of the kids had a room in the basement, as did I, so we went down to his room and he showed me this footlocker at the foot of his bed, this old chest. He opened it up and it was filled with single-page comic strips in pencil that he’d been doing since he was a little kid. We were going through those and they were all really funny and clever, and so that was my first impression of Wilson.”

“In high school, I liked to draw,” said Wilson. “I was drawing, drawing, drawing. I was obsessed with chess and drawing. I was a recluse, drawing comic strips compulsively. So I was called a squirrel, which, at the time, meant egghead or geek. I hated everybody except for Ace, who I still see, and his now-dead brother, Muth, my Army buddy—and himself a brilliant artist. We were alienated and Beat. We wanted to be beatniks. Like, hey, man, let’s, like, fall down by the Zoo Bar and, you know, whatever, you know.”

“After school he’d come over to my place sometimes,” said Williams. “We’d sit around and listen to cool jazz records—at least we thought they were cool.

He would drink his tea. He would drink these exotic teas, like these smoky, rich Chinese teas. I was a cigarette smoker back then and I got into kind of an affected habit of smoking imported cigarettes. I thought that made me look cool and arty. I would show him

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my latest pack of cigarettes that I got at the tobacco shop, some strange brand from who knows where, and he would admire that, and he’d show me his latest teas. Then we’d play some Gerry Mulligan jazz records.

Maybe it was in college he turned me on to this guy Kenneth Patchen who was a poet and made a recording of his poetry accompanied by jazz and we thought that was really hip. We’d do stuff like that, and we’d draw sometimes.

“We both had bicycles in high school. Not too many people had cars back then, but we had bicycles. We would get together on the weekends and ride our bikes. He had this beautiful Raleigh bicycle that I was very envious of that was kind of the top of the line back then, with gears and everything. It was a Dutch bike. I’d never seen anything like it. It was kind of an odd-looking frame and very narrow handlebars and you had to ride on it very upright. It was called a Magneet. I thought that was just so cool.

“We’d also go out into the country sometimes. He had some kind of realistic toy guns and we’d play Army with a bunch of guys and go out and run around in the countryside and use these toy guns.”

Ace’s older brother Muth and his friends Jerry Jacoby and Clair Morgan also liked to draw comics, which Steve and Ace discovered by snooping. Steve said, “These were the older guys in high school. I was drawing my shit and they were drawing their stuff, except their drawings were more fetish and mind-blowing. These guys were also hip to EC but they had their own styles, and they were doing these jam session drawings of real bizarre shit, sexual stuff. They were kind of secretive about them.

“They had these characters like the Jack Off Machine that Clair Morgan did, and they passed these things back and forth. This guy is sitting in a chair and he’s got the machine to jerk him off and he’s adding oil and the arm is going putt putt putt putt and then he ran out of oil to lubricate the machine stroking his dick. ‘I can’t turn it off. I can’t turn it off.’ It jerked him off to the point where, when he turned off the machine, his dick was like a burnt matchstick and the end of his dick fell off.

“I went, ‘wow, this is even weirder than the EC guys,’ but it had a different kind of style, really arty shit, you know.”

At school Wilson was often called upon to draw posters for school events and illustrations for the high school literary magazine, the Scribe. He was shy around girls, especially the exotic-looking Latvian girls whose families had moved to Lincoln. “In high school, nobody ever got laid, but everybody fought,” Wilson said.

“When I was fourteen, James Mosely, who was black, insulted my mother in art class. So I had to be macho and we started to get into a fight. Like if you’re in jail, you have to show heart. So I had to fight Mosely.”

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They postponed their showdown until after school; they agreed to meet in the boy’s room. “It was a Friday night, and I wanted to get the fight over because I was buying my pet parrot from a sailor back in Nebraska.

I was really looking forward to getting Mabel the Parrot because that was the closest I could get to being a pirate. So I thought, ‘Fight Mosely. Get it out of the way. And if you live, you can buy the parrot for dessert.’

“So anyway, we meet in the bathroom. I hit him as hard as I could. I only got one chance. I hit him as hard as I could and it really pissed him off, because he was not as tender and delicate as your humble narrator. He pretty much kicked my ass. Okay, now I can relax, put my nose back in shape, and buy this fucking parrot.”

He got his parrot, but the fight led to unexpected consequences.

“This guy tells me, you were crazy to fight Mosely, because he’s a Junior Golden Gloves champion, which I didn’t know. I was a piece of candy to him. Anyway, I blew that off and didn’t think anything about it.

But then people were still fucking with me. They were real redneck assholes. Then out of nowhere, which was my proudest moment in high school, this guy was going, ‘Wilson, you creep, turn around, you Neanderthal motherfucker. I’m going to kick your ass,’ and then, Don Posey, who was a track star in Nebraska, a black jock athlete, stood up and pointed at the guy and said, ‘if you’re fucking with Wilson, you’re fucking with us.’

“To this very day, I get kind of a chill. I had this whole fucking black cadre behind me, because I showed heart and fought Mosely, and I’m a fucking squirrel. I’m more of a minority than they are. So fuck all of you. It was my best moment in high school.”

Mabel remained a longtime member of the Wilson family after Steve left home. She lived with them for more than forty years. She had bright red and green feathers and could talk a bit, said Linda. “My dad was just crazy about Mabel. She had these funny little idiosyncrasies. Mabel and my dad were very close.” In 1983 Mabel surprised everyone by laying an egg. The local paper sent out a reporter to cover the story.

“My husband found the egg when he was cleaning up Mabel’s cage,” Mrs. Wilson said.

“She’d been acting strange, and hiding under a newspaper, and there was her egg.”

The egg is infertile, but it is quite an accomplishment since quite often parrots in captivity do not lay eggs. And it solves a mystery for the Wilsons.

“We call the parrot Mabel, but we weren’t sure the name was appropriate until we found the egg,” Mrs. Wilson confided. †

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“HE PRETTY MUCH KICKED MY ASS. OKAY, NOW I CAN RELAX, PUT MY NOSE BACK IN SHAPE, AND BUY THIS FUCKING PARROT.”

Unlike many of his colleagues, Wilson made his underground debut in Zap Comix rather than newspapers; but after that, numerous tabloids, including Gothic Blimp Works in New York and the San Francisco Good Times, welcomed his work. !"#$%&'()*(&#+(,$-./(0%$1(!"#$%&'()%*+',"-./(234(35657

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“Boogie Boogie Horror Yarn” from Laugh in the Dark, 1971.

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“Boogie Boogie Horror Yarn” from Laugh in the Dark, 1971.

“Whip Tip Tales” from San Francisco Comic Book #1, 1970.

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“Whip Tip Tales” from San Francisco Comic Book #1, 1970.

“Whip Tip Tales” from San Francisco Comic Book #1, 1970.

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