Sometime in the bitter godless morning of winter, well before sunrise in the godless waste of the early 21^st Century; Cheney’s America where the highs are always second class butt the hangovers last for months; a tall, dark and bedraggled figure stops in front of a non-descript storefront and awning on the Southwest corner of 22^nd and Guerrero in San Francisco’s Mission District.

The tall, dark and bedraggled figure leans forward on his cane as the night fog sweeps down from Twin Peaks. He limps forward a couple of steps toward the window, and tries to see inside the darkness. He pulls out a flask, one of his most instinctual moves, and takes a long, deep pull of cheap end rotgut before returning it to its trusty holding spot and peering back into the locked up commercial space.

It’s not easy making the years melt away, but somehow, somewhere deep inside the subconscious gallery of imprints, the Vampyre manages to pull up the file where he can see the ghost of a final, flamed out youth.

There they all are again…Joie Cook, Danielle Willis, David Gollub, Bruce Issacson, Kathleen Wood, Jack Micheline with his little club kid hanger on Matt Gonzales…and the once and mighty patron saint of this once and mighty temple, David Lerner. A distant echo, the voice of Julia Vinograd having migrated over from Telegraph for the evening’s communion; her booming blues mama voice yells “STARTING!!!”

And he, the tall, dark and bedraggled figure, had been a high priest among this congregation, once upon a time.

But soon enough, the initial sting and rush of the rotgut begins its slide back down into the familiar stupor, and the vision all too predictably fades. And the tall, dark and bedraggled figure limps on down the street, his cane ready for any necessary action that may target him, but with just enough of the memory to keep him warm enough to the next pull or the next bed.

Long before it became cool, yea even trendy to be a trailer park pirate or an “Outlaw Poet” with an intellect, there was Vampyre Mike Kassel openly admitting he read the old texts and the old myths (The Iliad, the Torah)…not in school, but on his own time while in-between recovering from another epic hangover, dueling with an old lover or visiting yet another death bed strapped friend-fiend.

Kassel the spoken-word artist walked the walk as a low maintenance, heavy laboring couch surfer who could embed (and bed) himself perfectly amongst not just the Babarians but also the hard edged (at least then) Bay Area punk scene during the eighties and nineties. But Michael Alan Kassel was also a gifted musician, a theatrical prankster impresario, and a genuine pagan, comfortably rubbing shoulders with Norse gods and Jungian archetypes at the same time; a truly, uniquely American renaissance artist, meeting Thoreau’s charge and manifesting Whitman’s ideal.

Vampyre Mike finally had his meeting with the reaper, many versions of which he wise-assedly (and smartly) wrote about in his career on March 22, 2008.

And the hard truth is that there just haven’t been that many rock & roll poets before Kassel, and being the real deal, he has in turn set an incredibly high bar for any “counter-cultural” poet who might casually ponder taking the road of D.A. Levy, Jim Morrision and now Vampyre Mike.

He took many cliché poetry moves, such as overuse of capitalization, Romantic pretense, numbered verses, blues ballads & naturally sea shanty’s, and reinvented them as his own…as an uncompromising rock & roll poet. And nowhere is this on better display than in Toxic Vaudeville (Ajax Press of San Francisco). On the cover is a picture of the Vampyre Mike I remember from the 90’s, a comfortable unapologetic member of the first generation of 40 year old punks, who could dominate a high maintenance nightclub with sheer personality.

The poems in this collection were not written for the page, but primarily for performance, and while I confess to my supposedly hardened, supposedly “literate” inner poetry editor wincing while reading some of these pieces, I also had the advantage of having seen Mike perform Above Paradise (yes, a high-maintenance night club) with David Lerner over ten years ago. When I found my own inner curmudgeon rising up in protest while reading pieces like “Johnny’s Going Down”, “The Hungry Season” and particularly “Aren’t You Getting Too Old For This?” I made myself picture Mike, not as I remembered him in his later years, but as the iconoclastic tour guide of Hades, leather jacket, freak-out long hair and Beelzebub goatee stomping in his boots on a stage, bleeding out the lines through an amplifier. These were poems meant to be heard with a crude fuzz guitar riff backing them and filtered through a drunken haze:

MAN, I WAS AT THE PARTY LAST NIGHT

I BORRROWED SOMEBODY’S VINTAGE ’57 MARTIN GUITAR.

BROKE THREE STRINGS

AND PUT A DING IN THE NECK.

I THINK I INSULTED THE EDITOR OF A MAGAZINE

THAT WAS CONSIDERING PUBLISHING A POEM OF MINE,

I KNOW I ACCIDENTALLY BARGED INTO THE BATHROOM

IN THE MIDDLE OF SOMEONE’S BLOWJOB

AND STAYED TO PISS ANYWAY.

I ARGUED POLITICS WITH A COMMUNIST,

DANCED THE FUNKY CHICKEN WITH A GIRL ON CRUTCHES

(I THINK I WAS TRYING TO FAITH HEAL HER)

AND ACCIDENTALLY SPILLED BEER IN THE AQUARIUM

I TOLD A FRIEND WHO WAS WORRYING ABOUT GETTING OLD

THAT HE WAS BORN TO BE MIDDLE AGED,

I PUT THE CHIPMUNKS SING THE BEATLES ON THE STEREO

CRANKED THE VOLUME UP TO 11, AND THREATENED TO

PUNCH OUT

ANYONE WHO TRIED TO TAKE IT OFF,

I FOUND THE ROOM WHERE EVERYBODY TOSSED THEIR COATS

AND SWITCHED EVERYONE’S CAR KEYS.

I PHONED IN A NOISE COMPLAINT TO THE POLICE

I PUT A FIFTH OF VODKA IN THE NON-ALCOHOLIC PUNCH

I STUCK MY NOSE DOWN EVERY WOMAN’S DECOLLETAGE

RANG THE NEIGHBORS’ DOORBEL AND RAN AWAY,

AND ACCIDENTALLY SAT IN THE LASAGNA.

I FOUND THE EIGHTEEN YEAR OLD CHICK WHO WAS ALL

BROKEN UP

BECAUSE HER FIRST ONE TRUE LOVE HAD LEFT HER AND I

TOLD HER IT MEANT

SHE WAS PROBABLY A LESBIAN.

I PUMPED UP THE KEG, STUCK THE NOZZLE IN MY MOUTH

AND GUZZLED TILL SOMEONE THREW ME OFF THE BACK PORCH.

THEN I WENT OUT AND COPPED SOME RUM

WHEN I GOT BACK TO THE PARTY

SOME JERK TRIED TO KEEP ME OUT

BUT I JUST BROKE A WINDOW AND CLIMBED BACK IN.

I DON’T REMEMBER MUCH ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED AFTER THAT

UNTIL THE FIREMEN SHOWED UP.

THEN I JUST GRABBED MY GUITAR AND MY RUM AND SPLIT.

I WAITED TWO HOURS FOR A BUS THAT STOPPED RUNNING

AT MIDNIGHT

THEN LURCHED A BROKEN THREE MILE TRIP HOME

PAUSING ONLY TO PISS ON CERTAIN RICH BASTARDS’

WELCOME HOME MATS,

I WAS A HIT IN CLOWN ALLEY HAMBURGER HELL

WHEN I GAVE THEM A TWENTY UNDER THE ASSUMPTION THAT

IT WAS A ONE.

THEY KEPT THE CHANGE,

THEN I WOKE UP EVERYONE IN MY HOTEL

WHEN I DROPPED MY GUITAR DOWN THE LIGHTWELL

BUT I NEVER PUKED ONCE.

SO, LIKE, SO MUCH FOR FRIDAY NIGHT.

HEY DUDE, IT’S LIKE, SATURDAY NIGHT, MAN…

WHERE THE HELL IS THE FUCKING PARTY?!

I remember watching Mike perform that same poem through my own blithering, drunken agenda all those years ago and realized with something between fascination and horror that I wanted to be him, and realized, with even greater anguish, that I never would be.

Toxic Vaudeville was published mere months before Vampyre Mike’s passing. It is a collection of later career poems, many of which were written for, performed for and only experienced by Café Babar audience members until now.

There is a 90 page section of Kassel’s prankster stories at the end of the book, and truthfully the poems are stronger. Kassel treated fiction like tall tales with extended jokes and put-ons, his flash prose frequently ending in a punch line. He was not going for the deep, intellectual musing like one would find in the pages of Glimmer Train (in fact, one of his early books with Manic D Press was titled Going for the Low Blow.) Like his hero Jim Morrison, Kassel seemed to want to be something other than what his reputation was built on, always more interested in the most outrageous stories possible. In fact, many of Kassel’s stories are simply characters from his life sitting around a bar sharing stories, and a more effective collection of these works can be found in Graveyard Golf & Other Stories (Manic D Press). Many of the characters who are met in Graveyard Golf show up in the stories in Toxic Vaudeville, unforgettable low life’s like Stevie Malone, The Worst Person In The World, and Freddie the Weasel, as well as The Radium Pit, the most incredible dive blues/punk bar in Oakland which serves as the setting for Kassel’s tall tales.

The tales are sometimes hilarious, serving as rock & roll analogies or low satire, but more frequently having the beer drenched scent of “ya had to be there” hanging on them…Mike wouldn’t have had it any other way. He didn’t pretend to be a serious fiction writer…he was an extremely serious poet, a serious jester, and a serious prankster who wrote unabashedly for the masses. He still throws out the same punch lines in his poems that he does in his stories, but the difference is that in Kassel’s poems, the effect is as profound a stumbling upon the truth as any reader could ask for:

I wanted to write something serious,
a page that would ignite when exposed to air.
I wanted to dive deep into my soul
and swim back to the surface
with some big bloody truth clenched between my teeth.
I wanted something that would burn in the mind
like a malarial fever
you could never quite put out.
Something that would inspire
lust and revulsion simultaneously.
Something so dangerous
that Bush would have to send an invasion force
deep into my head.
Something that would replace the Gideon Bible
in the hotel drawers of the world.
Something so big, so beautiful and so true
that the sun would immediately eclipse himself
because he knew we were onto him.
I wanted to write something more addictive than crack,
more debilitating than love,
and more destructive than religion.
I wanted to make the moon weep.
I wanted to build a mirror so cruelly true
that it would send all the yuppie lawyers
and investment bankers
howling into the bush to make honest livings
as highwaymen, headhunters and horse thieves.
I wanted to write something that Ringo would understand,
something God would not forgive,
something the Weekly World News would refuse to print
because it was in bad taste.
I wanted to write something that would make
Rimbaud and Baudelaire
grind their teeth in envy
and throw their pens at the moon.
I wanted to give Poe the willies.
I wanted to make nuns wet their pants.
I wanted to make dogs howl, highways tremble,
and hair grow on grandma’s bald head.
I wanted to write something
that would make everyone illiterate.
I wanted to write something so beautiful
that it would make every woman in the world
fall in love with me
so I could break their hearts simultaneously.
I wanted to write something that would make money chuckle.
I wanted to write something that would cure cancer
and then kill you anyways.
I wanted a poem
A real poem.
A Robert Graves spit in the eye
this is the way the Iliad goes
so early in the morning dance round the campfire
roses are red barnburner of a walloping good God
did he really say that
motherfucking mouthful of meat
bad ass bitch of a poem
poem.
Know what I mean?
But
just as I got the paper in the machine
Della switched on “The Flintstones”
And all that came out of the typewriter
Was
Yabba dabba doo.

• I WANTED TO WRITE SOMETHING SERIOUS

(from “Wild Kingdom”, Zeitgeist Press, 1992) posted at http://www.sfheart.com/sfpoets/kassel/mcCowen.html)

The above poem was posted by Kassel’s friend and fellow freak Babarian Whitman McGowan at the SF Heart site, in conjunction with a powerful memorial service held for Vampyre on the Lower Haight’s Café International. Mike’s reputation (and I don’t use the word “career” because the mere concept of a “Career” is something he was genuinely allergic too) was cemented in performing pieces like this one at the Café Babar, which one could argue would not have been as compelling a scene as it was without him.

Mike saved his most powerful proclamations for the very act of poetry, or impassioned creation in general; the jester is never wiser than when justifying his existence in the sheer contradiction of all reality and pretension to “civility.”

McGowan’s bio at the SF Heart site is invaluable because it shows that, of course, there wasn’t always a Vampyre Mike, but a series of personae that were a musician, a theatrical performer…in essence a genuine troubadour of the underworld whose sole mission is to keep anyone from getting too serious about anything when it isn’t warranted, which mostly it isn’t. And the funny thing about it is, Vampyre Mike could point this out to you and make you come away not feeling so bad about it, maybe even laughing about it.

Toast one for the Vampyre this All Hallow’s Eve, this Day of the Dead…Halloween was his season, his favorite part of the year (Freddie The Weasel’s Halloween, Cub Scouts from Hell from Graveyard Golf and The Lords of Halloween from Toxic Vaudeville)…he was the best of us who like to consider ourselves “underground” or “counter-cultural”; someone who lived what those words really meant, for better or worse.

Paul Corman-Roberts is Tony DuShane’s #5 (and easiest) bitch but he does manage to hold his own over at www.paulcormanroberts.com. Feel free to check out his new book from Howling Dog Press, "Coming WorldGone World: The Abomunauts Are Coming To Piss On Your Lawn".