They Might Be Giants Are Okay. No, really.
New Flash Fiction: The Wishing Well Divers
(An initial scene from a longer project I'm working on by the same name, under the pen name Steven Mizener.)
Zeke told me he got the idea from a movie, but he never
would say exactly which one. Whenever I posed him that question, he’d just
flash a big cagey grin my way and say something unrelated that didn’t
necessarily follow, like tonight when all he said was, “Well, shit, there goes
my future second wife—hold that thought, hoss!” as he plopped down off the bar
stool and galumphed his way out onto the dance floor at the Key Lime Lounge,
spilling more than a few drops of liquor from his glass as he went.
But then, Zeke was always like that—impulsive and what you
might call a little hard-headed, always running off half-cocked after some
crazy idea, then getting sidetracked on the way to wherever he was headed by a
half a dozen ideas even crazier than the one that had got him started running in
the first place. Never a boring moment with old Zeke around though, you could
say that much.
People said he had a few screws loose, and even though I was
probably the closest thing to a brother he ever had, I couldn’t exactly defend
him on that count. But I stuck by him, at least, which is more than you could
say about his actual kin. They never did much care for him, and neither did most
folks around town. And on nights like tonight it wasn’t hard to see why.
“Let it go—it ain’t
worth it, man!” I said, but my warning went ignored as he rushed off toward a little blonde
number with a tramp stamp peeking out under her halter-top, who anyone with a
lick of sense could see was nothing but trouble. Especially considering she had
one hand stuck down in the back pocket of a big bald son of a bitch who might
have been a goddamn NFL linebacker from what I could tell.
But from the look of it, Zeke couldn’t even see that big
muscle-bound wall standing there between him and the object of his affections:
His mind was made up. He was on a mission, and there was no putting the facts
or anything else in his way. He was bound and determined to bash his head right
into that wall if it came down to it.
I couldn’t hear what he said next, because he snuck up on
her from behind, leaned in real close and whispered right in her ear, but
whatever it was, it had exactly the effect I’d been expecting and dreading all
along. The blonde let out a disgusted yelp and twisted her face up at him like
she’d been bit by a rattlesnake and her boyfriend spun around on him and caught
Zeke by the back of the neck just as quick as if she really had been snake-bit and
Zeke was the offending reptile.
Fortunately for Zeke, baldy turned out to be a pretty cool
customer on balance. He wore expensive looking black slacks and a fitted silk
shirt, so I pegged him for a rich rubbernecker out getting a taste of the local
color down here on the Redneck Riviera. Whatever the reason, he kept his cool
in that situation the way only a man with something to lose will do.
So even though Zeke ended
up down on his knees in less than a minute flat begging for a chance to repent
from his sins before the entire congregation, at least he didn’t have to pick
his teeth up off the floor on the way out the door. With the help of a couple
of the other friendly patrons of the Key Lime Lounge, Blondie’s boyfriend
escorted Zeke outside. Not long after that, Blondie started putting up a fuss
about not feeling comfortable anymore, and I watched the pair of them work
their way through the crowd and out the door, too.
After things settled back down a bit, I moseyed on outside too
and found Zeke sitting there all by his lonesome on the side of the deck, just staring
off into the blue-green water and breathing in the salty gulf air. I offered
him a cigarette as a consolation prize as we both watched Blondie and her
bald-headed pit bull pull away from the lounge and speed off in a cloud of oyster-shell
dust in a silver beamer.
Zeke took the cigarette and picked up right where we’d left
off in our conversation from before, as if it was the most natural thing in the
world to do.
“Just think about it, Paul, damn it! It wouldn’t be no
different than diving for clams off the point—only we’d be hauling up buckets
of cash money instead. Think about that really old one out behind the old farm house. How many years have those damn tourists and their snotty little brats
been dumping their pocket change into that thing now? I reckon a hundred years
now. Maybe longer. There must be a fortune in coin down there! All I’m saying
is what good are those goddamn rich kid’s wishes doing sitting down there at
the bottom of that well, when we could be harvesting them up like clams and
taking care of our own?”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I could see now he was deadly
serious about this latest scheme of his. I knew it wasn’t a good idea to
encourage him, but considering the circumstances, I figured he could use
something to look forward to. So as much as I knew I would probably live to
regret it, I decided to play along.
“You might just be on to something,” I said, “all those wishes going to waste.
Getting corroded.”
And that was all it took. One tiny concession. He had me hooked and there was no
wriggling free.
At the Crowded Intersection of Art and Life
The man likeliest to have served as the real, historical inspiration for the mythological Faust—if one existed at all—was a German alchemist and general-purpose charlatan by the name of Dr. Johann Georg Faust, who is thought to have lived between 1480—1540.
After I had first conceived the story that would eventually become my recently completed novel “Faust: The Movie” (and which also informed the album “Faust” Lori and I released under the name Tangemeenie several years ago), I began devoting attention to another of my occasional free time interests: Researching my family’s genealogical history, an interest I inherited from my grandmother.
The death of another beloved family member late in 2009 rekindled my interest in investigating my family history. Only this time, I began exploring a different branch of the family tree than I had in the past, which led me one evening a year or so later to make the startling discovery that my great-great-great-great-great grandmother had been a woman named "Mary Ann Faust." (Source). My great-great aunt's obituary had identified her parents (and my great-grandmother's parents) as Albert Lorenzo Mizener and Lenora Van Horn, and this was the crucial piece of information that led to the unlikely result. I had previously traced the Mizener branch of the Family, but without the second name to work from, I hadn't learned much at all about the Van Horn branch.
I was still in the preliminary draft stages of writing "Faust: The Movie" at the time of this discovery, and even though finding such an unlikely personal connection to the name "Faust" struck me as an uncanny coincidence, I didn't give it much further thought at the time. I concluded "Faust" must have been a common surname at that particular point in American history (the early to mid 1800s) and left it at that.
It was only after I had completed work on my initial draft of "Faust: The Movie" that it occurred to me to return to this thread of evidence and investigate my personal connection to the name "Faust" in more detail. In fact, I only began looking more closely into these family connections over the last week or so, over the Thanksgiving Holidays.
I was completely unprepared for where my research would lead me, on a number of different levels, both personal and literary. One of the more immediately visceral shocks that lay in store concerned my great-great-great grandmother herself.
Mary Ann Faust married a man named Thaddeus Damascus Van Horn, a confederate soldier and 32nd degree Free Mason, who in the years preceding the Civil War rose to the rank of business manager of the New Orleans Crescent newspaper. (Source) In 1848, prior to my ancestor's association with that once distinguished publication, poet Walt Whitman had served briefly as its co-editor before being fired for his antislavery views. (Source) During my ancestor's tenure, The Crescent became a powerful pro-secessionist voice in the South in the years immediately leading up to the war, until its operations were shut down by military order during the war.
Mary Ann Faust was the child of Mary Ann and Daniel D. Faust of South Carolina. And after Daniel's death, the Van Horn and Faust families became embroiled in a bitter dispute over the division of the estate, which included several slaves. According to filed court reports, the dispute centered around Mary Ann Faust senior's new husband, a man who had "proven himself a cruel and unnecessarily severe master" and whom it was argued should therefore be viewed as unfit to manage the "property" of the estate. (Source)
I was tempted to stop digging right here. Having had no inkling that any of my ancestors owned slaves or played a significant role in the Civil War, these revelations came as shock enough. Growing up, the man I had known as my grandfather had been raised as a sharecropper and his mother was a full-blooded Cherokee, though I had learned even before his death that he was not a blood relation.
But my curiosity about the "Faust" lineage persisted, and so I kept doggedly trying to trace the family name back through history as far as I could, expecting to quickly find evidence that would rule out the remote possibility of a family link to the historical Johann Georg Faust.
Although lines of evidence going back much further in US history than the Civil War are hard to find without a significant commitment of time and other personal resources, I was aided in part by the notoriety of my ancestors and a fortunate accident of history in narrowing down my research: As it turns out, all the Fausts in South Carolina at this particular time in history are believed to have been descended from a common ancestor, a German immigrant named Henry Faust (given name, Johann Heinrich Faust). (Source)
Henry's roots trace back to Hans Faust, born around 1610 in Wolferborn, Hesse, Germany. It’s been difficult to establish anything definitive about the lineage beyond this point. But one of Hans' children was named "Johann Georg," which tantalizingly suggests this may have been a family name. (Source)
In any case, the occurrence of the name Faust in my family tree would be shocking enough even if the connection ended there. Because I had absolutely no idea any such connection existed when I first began work on “Faust: The Movie.” In fact, I didn't even realize the Faust mythology had a possible real-world historical precedent. I had become acquainted with the myth through reading Goethe's Faust and Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, and only began exploring the cultural history of the subject in any real depth after completing my manuscript.
Looking back, it seems more than a little unlikely that I would just happen to write a novel thematically concerned with the idea that the creation of works of art sometimes reveals unexpected truths to us about ourselves, only to find that same novel leading me on an improbable journey of personal discovery of my own. But that's exactly how it happened.
I'm tempted to say, "this must mean something!" (and perhaps enter a trance state in which I fashion a bust of TD Van Horn out of mashed potatoes). But if it means anything at all, perhaps it's only that history remains a better artist than any of us could ever hope to be. But that risks stating the obvious.
****
Teasing out the histories of the ancestors of TD Van Horn and Mary Ann Faust further, a few facts seem especially striking.
On the Faust side of the family, there are historically murky, possible connections to a man alleged to have been in league with the devil; on the Van Horn side there are boastful claims about family links to the so-called Merovingian Line of Frankish kings, which (thanks almost entirely to the imaginative research of Da Vinci Code author, Dan Brown, as far as I can tell) is claimed to provide a direct line of descent to Jesus Christ.
Of course, both of these dubious narratives should only ever be consumed with a healthy dollop of skepticism to top them off. But aesthetically, their convergence in the real historical figures of TD Van Horn and his first wife, Mary Ann Faust, make for a compellingly romantic picture: One can almost imagine the fantastical antebellum period-drama playing out on the silver screen in which Mary Faust confesses the satanic curse on her bloodline to TD Van Horn, begging him for a marriage commitment, on the argument that only the holy blood running through his veins could possibly counteract the demonic blood in her own.
But before I let my imagination run away with the show, let’s put this picturesque and entirely fictional historical moment into some perspective.
I previously touched on the elder Mary Faust’s less than honorable performance as administrator or her husband’s estate (along with the related allegations that she may have been an unnecessarily cruel mistress to the slaves in her charge). But the historical evidence suggests the Van Horns were often less than saintly in their personal conduct as well.
During the American revolutionary war period , the stately Van Horns were known for raucous bacchanalia, frequently receiving notable visitors from both sides of the revolutionary conflict, often at the same time.
In particular, according to one account told by the wife of John Burgoyne the British general who surrendered in the Battle of Saratoga (after his surrender), one evening when she was in attendance as a "guest of the American Congress" at the Van Horn mansion in Middlebrook, NJ: "There was a wild party, in the course of which everyone sang 'God Bless Great Washington, God damn the King', all night long." (Source)
The family’s unseemly cosmopolitanism in a time of war led to speculation about the depth of their loyalty to the revolutionary cause, but never seemed to diminish their elevated social standing.
Predictably, the Van Horn family also didn't escape untouched by the original sin of early America’s “peculiar institution.” There are reports of Van Horns offering rewards for the return of escaped slaves as far back as 1736. (Source) (And if there’s one thing that seems clear to me at least, regardless of which of the innumerable contradictory interpretation of the Gospels you subscribe to, if any, it’s that no mystically-empowered direct ancestor of Jesus Christ would have owned slaves.)
So much for the pleasingly symmetrical fantasy of TD Van Horn’s descent from a sacred blood line and Mary Faust’s descent from a profane one. Judging by the stories that swirled around the family before and during the revolutionary war, theirs was a match for the more common forms of profanity, at least.
It might also be tempting to speculate about the peculiar fact that it was not long after the convergence of these two myth-enshrouded bloodlines that the Van Horn family’s fortunes underwent a dramatic reversal.
By the 1920s, the Van Horns in America were generating newsprint unfit for the society pages. The contemporary descendants of the line became more closely identified with embarrassingly desperate grabs for legacy wealth the rest of the world no longer felt they held claim to than with either European or antebellum aristocracy. (Source)
But a closer, less fanciful reading of the history suggests no supernatural explanations are required to account for the decline. A stubborn unwillingness to let go of ancestral glory (as embodied on one hand by TD Van Horn’s self-destructive passion for the Southern Confederacy’s doomed, pseudo-royalist cause, and by the latter-day Van Horns’ ridiculous attempts to reclaim much of Manhattan on the other) seems a more likely culprit. That is, assuming any explanations more satisfying to one's sense of poetic justice than historical accident are required.
And yet, I’m still left here to ponder the strange confluence of personal and historical accident that has led me to this point. How did I get here? What compelled me to make the myth of Faust the focus of my creative energies for nearly a decade, only to discover now at this late date that this bizarre personal connection to the story lay hidden there in plain sight for so long? I honestly don’t know. A recent family visit with a cousin in a position to know confirmed that these family roots were not previously understood within our more immediate family. I probably never will know the answers to these questions.
But it occurs to me that while fiction can take many strange shapes, human history when viewed at the level of personal experience can takes stranger shapes still.
After I had first conceived the story that would eventually become my recently completed novel “Faust: The Movie” (and which also informed the album “Faust” Lori and I released under the name Tangemeenie several years ago), I began devoting attention to another of my occasional free time interests: Researching my family’s genealogical history, an interest I inherited from my grandmother.
The death of another beloved family member late in 2009 rekindled my interest in investigating my family history. Only this time, I began exploring a different branch of the family tree than I had in the past, which led me one evening a year or so later to make the startling discovery that my great-great-great-great-great grandmother had been a woman named "Mary Ann Faust." (Source). My great-great aunt's obituary had identified her parents (and my great-grandmother's parents) as Albert Lorenzo Mizener and Lenora Van Horn, and this was the crucial piece of information that led to the unlikely result. I had previously traced the Mizener branch of the Family, but without the second name to work from, I hadn't learned much at all about the Van Horn branch.
I was still in the preliminary draft stages of writing "Faust: The Movie" at the time of this discovery, and even though finding such an unlikely personal connection to the name "Faust" struck me as an uncanny coincidence, I didn't give it much further thought at the time. I concluded "Faust" must have been a common surname at that particular point in American history (the early to mid 1800s) and left it at that.
It was only after I had completed work on my initial draft of "Faust: The Movie" that it occurred to me to return to this thread of evidence and investigate my personal connection to the name "Faust" in more detail. In fact, I only began looking more closely into these family connections over the last week or so, over the Thanksgiving Holidays.
I was completely unprepared for where my research would lead me, on a number of different levels, both personal and literary. One of the more immediately visceral shocks that lay in store concerned my great-great-great grandmother herself.
Mary Ann Faust married a man named Thaddeus Damascus Van Horn, a confederate soldier and 32nd degree Free Mason, who in the years preceding the Civil War rose to the rank of business manager of the New Orleans Crescent newspaper. (Source) In 1848, prior to my ancestor's association with that once distinguished publication, poet Walt Whitman had served briefly as its co-editor before being fired for his antislavery views. (Source) During my ancestor's tenure, The Crescent became a powerful pro-secessionist voice in the South in the years immediately leading up to the war, until its operations were shut down by military order during the war.
Mary Ann Faust was the child of Mary Ann and Daniel D. Faust of South Carolina. And after Daniel's death, the Van Horn and Faust families became embroiled in a bitter dispute over the division of the estate, which included several slaves. According to filed court reports, the dispute centered around Mary Ann Faust senior's new husband, a man who had "proven himself a cruel and unnecessarily severe master" and whom it was argued should therefore be viewed as unfit to manage the "property" of the estate. (Source)
I was tempted to stop digging right here. Having had no inkling that any of my ancestors owned slaves or played a significant role in the Civil War, these revelations came as shock enough. Growing up, the man I had known as my grandfather had been raised as a sharecropper and his mother was a full-blooded Cherokee, though I had learned even before his death that he was not a blood relation.
But my curiosity about the "Faust" lineage persisted, and so I kept doggedly trying to trace the family name back through history as far as I could, expecting to quickly find evidence that would rule out the remote possibility of a family link to the historical Johann Georg Faust.
Although lines of evidence going back much further in US history than the Civil War are hard to find without a significant commitment of time and other personal resources, I was aided in part by the notoriety of my ancestors and a fortunate accident of history in narrowing down my research: As it turns out, all the Fausts in South Carolina at this particular time in history are believed to have been descended from a common ancestor, a German immigrant named Henry Faust (given name, Johann Heinrich Faust). (Source)
Henry's roots trace back to Hans Faust, born around 1610 in Wolferborn, Hesse, Germany. It’s been difficult to establish anything definitive about the lineage beyond this point. But one of Hans' children was named "Johann Georg," which tantalizingly suggests this may have been a family name. (Source)
In any case, the occurrence of the name Faust in my family tree would be shocking enough even if the connection ended there. Because I had absolutely no idea any such connection existed when I first began work on “Faust: The Movie.” In fact, I didn't even realize the Faust mythology had a possible real-world historical precedent. I had become acquainted with the myth through reading Goethe's Faust and Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, and only began exploring the cultural history of the subject in any real depth after completing my manuscript.
Looking back, it seems more than a little unlikely that I would just happen to write a novel thematically concerned with the idea that the creation of works of art sometimes reveals unexpected truths to us about ourselves, only to find that same novel leading me on an improbable journey of personal discovery of my own. But that's exactly how it happened.
I'm tempted to say, "this must mean something!" (and perhaps enter a trance state in which I fashion a bust of TD Van Horn out of mashed potatoes). But if it means anything at all, perhaps it's only that history remains a better artist than any of us could ever hope to be. But that risks stating the obvious.
****
Teasing out the histories of the ancestors of TD Van Horn and Mary Ann Faust further, a few facts seem especially striking.
On the Faust side of the family, there are historically murky, possible connections to a man alleged to have been in league with the devil; on the Van Horn side there are boastful claims about family links to the so-called Merovingian Line of Frankish kings, which (thanks almost entirely to the imaginative research of Da Vinci Code author, Dan Brown, as far as I can tell) is claimed to provide a direct line of descent to Jesus Christ.
Of course, both of these dubious narratives should only ever be consumed with a healthy dollop of skepticism to top them off. But aesthetically, their convergence in the real historical figures of TD Van Horn and his first wife, Mary Ann Faust, make for a compellingly romantic picture: One can almost imagine the fantastical antebellum period-drama playing out on the silver screen in which Mary Faust confesses the satanic curse on her bloodline to TD Van Horn, begging him for a marriage commitment, on the argument that only the holy blood running through his veins could possibly counteract the demonic blood in her own.
But before I let my imagination run away with the show, let’s put this picturesque and entirely fictional historical moment into some perspective.
I previously touched on the elder Mary Faust’s less than honorable performance as administrator or her husband’s estate (along with the related allegations that she may have been an unnecessarily cruel mistress to the slaves in her charge). But the historical evidence suggests the Van Horns were often less than saintly in their personal conduct as well.
During the American revolutionary war period , the stately Van Horns were known for raucous bacchanalia, frequently receiving notable visitors from both sides of the revolutionary conflict, often at the same time.
In particular, according to one account told by the wife of John Burgoyne the British general who surrendered in the Battle of Saratoga (after his surrender), one evening when she was in attendance as a "guest of the American Congress" at the Van Horn mansion in Middlebrook, NJ: "There was a wild party, in the course of which everyone sang 'God Bless Great Washington, God damn the King', all night long." (Source)
The family’s unseemly cosmopolitanism in a time of war led to speculation about the depth of their loyalty to the revolutionary cause, but never seemed to diminish their elevated social standing.
Predictably, the Van Horn family also didn't escape untouched by the original sin of early America’s “peculiar institution.” There are reports of Van Horns offering rewards for the return of escaped slaves as far back as 1736. (Source) (And if there’s one thing that seems clear to me at least, regardless of which of the innumerable contradictory interpretation of the Gospels you subscribe to, if any, it’s that no mystically-empowered direct ancestor of Jesus Christ would have owned slaves.)
So much for the pleasingly symmetrical fantasy of TD Van Horn’s descent from a sacred blood line and Mary Faust’s descent from a profane one. Judging by the stories that swirled around the family before and during the revolutionary war, theirs was a match for the more common forms of profanity, at least.
It might also be tempting to speculate about the peculiar fact that it was not long after the convergence of these two myth-enshrouded bloodlines that the Van Horn family’s fortunes underwent a dramatic reversal.
By the 1920s, the Van Horns in America were generating newsprint unfit for the society pages. The contemporary descendants of the line became more closely identified with embarrassingly desperate grabs for legacy wealth the rest of the world no longer felt they held claim to than with either European or antebellum aristocracy. (Source)
But a closer, less fanciful reading of the history suggests no supernatural explanations are required to account for the decline. A stubborn unwillingness to let go of ancestral glory (as embodied on one hand by TD Van Horn’s self-destructive passion for the Southern Confederacy’s doomed, pseudo-royalist cause, and by the latter-day Van Horns’ ridiculous attempts to reclaim much of Manhattan on the other) seems a more likely culprit. That is, assuming any explanations more satisfying to one's sense of poetic justice than historical accident are required.
And yet, I’m still left here to ponder the strange confluence of personal and historical accident that has led me to this point. How did I get here? What compelled me to make the myth of Faust the focus of my creative energies for nearly a decade, only to discover now at this late date that this bizarre personal connection to the story lay hidden there in plain sight for so long? I honestly don’t know. A recent family visit with a cousin in a position to know confirmed that these family roots were not previously understood within our more immediate family. I probably never will know the answers to these questions.
But it occurs to me that while fiction can take many strange shapes, human history when viewed at the level of personal experience can takes stranger shapes still.
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