My friend Randy and I like to smoke dope and try to perfect our Esoteric Trail of Mississippi we plan to travel stop by stop one day, even though our state already has far too many gas-guzzling tourist trails, the most popular of which is Blues Trail followed by the Natchez Trace and the Writers Trail, but let’s not forget the Racial Atrocity Trail (forever intertwined with the Fascist Trail), and, for the kids, there’s always the Legendary Quarterbacks Trail and the Shitload of Miss Americas Trail. The Esoteric Trail we keep tweaking is connected by a tone of absurdity and horror and includes such whistle stops as Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Crash Sight and the Salt Domes Where They Used To Ineptly Blow Up Atomic Bombs (my mother turned hippie activist at age fifty-five to protest the plans to store America’s nuclear waste inside those same salt domes). And, for those who dare, there’s the Seriously Spooky Pascagoula UFO Landing Site (“Mississippi: Our Space Aliens Can Beat Up Your Space Aliens”) that commemorates the grotesque six-foot-tall extraterrestrials with crab-claw hands and anal-probe eyes who could float through the air and often did so as they approached my childhood bed each night to slaver over me until I awoke screaming. But the very first stop on the Esoteric Trail is much closer to our stoner hearts, and that is the site we will call Bill Hicks’s Extremely Ironic Grave.
If there were a Dead People You Wouldn’t Expect To Find Buried In Mississippi Trail, then that trail and ours would converge in Leakesville at the cigarette-scattered gravestone of the comedian Bill Hicks, who died at age thirty-three in 1994 of pancreatic cancer, although it’s almost certain the cancer saved him from having to be suicided by the CIA. Hicks was a miraculously brave and miraculously self-destructive gadfly who seemed to be daring the Powers That Be (and they do be, y’all) by taunting the military-industrial complex and hammering home how stupid you must be to watch the Zapruder film even once and still believe JFK got shot from behind? (“Back and to the left, back and to the left!”) Yeah, it’s no wonder he got banned by Letterman. And all this was before Hicks traveled to the site of the Waco siege, while it was still in progress, and took up the cause of the twenty children who got set on fire for no good reason by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. So, yeah, the cancer saved everyone a lot of trouble, and after Bill Hicks died, his body was shipped to Freakhole, Mississippi, stuck in the ground, and, according to Cynthia True’s excellent biography American Scream, a few days after Hicks was buried, Carrot Top won the award for Funniest Male Stand-Up from the ACA. So, yes, irony all around, a feast of irony.
Melvin William Hicks (“thanks, Mom and Dad”) was born two months after me in 1961 and for twenty-six years now has been buried in the same county as my grandparents are. My mom’s people hail from Greene County as did both of Hicks’s parents, so I supposed we could even be related. You’d have to be pretty old to grasp Hicks’s influence on the South’s often-bewildering sense of humor (during my twenty years held hostage in frozen Vermont, I often considered getting a T-shirt that said: THAT WAS A JOKE). I’ve heard Hicks called the George Carlin of the South, but I strongly object to that comparison and would instead suggest Hicks was, in a type of history played Satanically backward like a Beatles album, the son of Dave Chappelle, who like Hicks began his professional career while still a child and was raised by comedy clubs. It’s a shame Hicks and Chappelle never got to share a cig on stage because they are two of our bravest, most philosophical comedians. Chappelle aside, it’s hard to compare any performer to Hicks in terms of courting self-destruction while actually on stage. Hicks was the Evel Knievel of 80s stand-up. Nobody who saw his act ever thought he would die of old age.
The reason I bring this up is that my second novel, The Last Taxi Driver, is about to be published by Tin House Books after a blurred twenty-year hiatus I took from publishing in order to spend more time with my family. The narrator of my novel is a full-time cabbie, just like I was for years, who is obsessed with UFOs and Bill Hicks, and there’s a strong connection between those two arcane phenomena. Before he died, Hicks described two different Close Encounters of the Third Kind he’d survived, and on stage he fused this UFO fascination with his disdain for the religious upbringing he’d endured in the Deep South. His initial UFO encounter involved psilocybin mushrooms, a caveat Hicks laments will leave us skeptical.
Three weeks ago, two of my friends and I went to a ranch in Fredericksburg, Texas, and took what Terence McKenna once called a “heroic dose.” Five dried grams. Without going into too much detail, me and my two friends had a shared vision, while not being together physically, of being taken up in a UFO. With a five-minute UFO experience, I got a taste of holiness I never got in twenty years of religion. To tell you the truth, the reason I quit doing mushrooms was because I had a UFO experience. So that’s a true story? That’s not just a comic riff? No, that’s true. What’s frustrating is that every time I tell the story, the first thing people ask is “Were you tripping?” And I go, yeah. And they go, oh yeah, right. But it was really profound, and I want to experience it again totally straight. So I can tell people I was straight. Why did I quit? Because after you’ve been taken aboard a UFO, it’s kinda hard to top that, all right? You know, they have Alcoholics Anonymous, they don’t have Aliens Anonymous. Fuck you, I’ve been on a UFO! Fuck off! I went drinking with aliens, you fucker! Shut up! “I lost my wife.” I LOST AN ALIEN CULTURE WHO WANTED TO TAKE ME TO THE PLANET ARTURUS. FUCK YOU!
And it was also while discussing UFOs that Hicks best revealed his views on the role of the artist in the modern world.
I, like all artists in Western cultures, am a shaman. Like Hendrix. Man, no one beats Hendrix. Fuck Eddie Van Halen, fuck Stevie Vau—no one beats fuckin’—Hendrix was an alien, okay? His ship landed, they said, “Jimi, show ’em how it’s done and we’ll pick you up in twenty-eight years.”
You see, Jung had this idea of a Collective Unconscious which mankind shared . . . and I agree. But!—I think this Collective Mind is supposed to be conscious, not unconscious. And that is our job as the Agents of Evolution to enlighten—to bring light into the dark corners of that Netherworld and thus awaken our Mind to Truth and complete the circle that was broken with the dream of our Fall from Grace. And if we evolve the idea, you see, the planet might be more compassionate and something like heaven might dawn. I want everyone here to take the five dried grams I taped under y’all chairs right now. Under your chairs: check ’em out. Let’s go, man. The fucking UFOs are waiting in the fifth dimension. Let’s go! We’ll do it later. We’ll do it as a closer.
Hicks was of course far from alone in perceiving a spiritual side to the UFO phenomenon, and it was his hero Carl Jung who’d first described flying saucers as an emerging archetype in our collective unconscious. An old man by then, Jung regretted he would not live long enough to fully grasp the significance of what he termed these new angels of technology. And it was obvious the world needed a new archetype back then. World War II, the ending of which birthed the modern UFO phenomenon, had destroyed the ability of millions of humans to keep faith in a god of love who sacrificed his only begotten son yada yada yada in order to forgive us for being the miserably masturbating monkeys we actually are. Those two unnecessary bombs we dropped on the innocent women and children of Japan, thereby melting their skin onto their skeletons like so much poured paint, forced us as a species to step back and regard ourselves in utter horror after which the influence of Christianity waned in America as it had already done in Europe. Yet our DNA seems hardwired for religion, and to lose one faith often requires the subconscious to latch on to another faith as opposed to going full-force atheist and trading Eternal Damnation for Eternal Nothing, a reality the poet Philip Larkin described as “nothing more terrible, nothing more true.”
UFOs in America have always been a religion. The contactee craze of 1950s helped give us the New Age movement via a series of channeled Hallmark messages, illustrated with photographs of airborne trash-can lids, designed to save our planet from ruin. Yet as the French prophet of UFOs Jacques Vallee has argued, there’s little reason to assume these UFOs come from other planets. It’s likelier their captains are interdimensional and/or time-traveling beings threatened by our capacity to annihilate a shared habitat we call earth. These disparate influences eventually inspired Bill Hicks to devise his own self-negating religion that is perhaps best likened to The Church of Christ Without Christ in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood.
Folks, it’s time to evolve ideas. You know, evolution did not end with us growing thumbs. You do know that, right? Didn’t end there. We’re at the point now where we’re going to have to evolve ideas. The reason the world’s so fucked up is we’re undergoing evolution. And the reason our institutions, our traditional religions, are all crumbling is because they’re no longer relevant. Ha ha ha ha ha ha! They’re no longer relevant. So it’s time for us to create a new philosophy and perhaps even a new religion. I believe there is a commonality to all humanity: we all suck. I am a Misanthropic Humanist. It’s a weird conflict when you are your own bête noire. Do I like people? They’re great in theory.
As with Chappelle, or any worthwhile comedian who pushes the limits of free speech, Hicks’s lifetime on stage can be cherrypicked to crucify him by those who henceforth deserve lives bereft of laughter and art. But, yes, there were tirades in which Hicks seemed to become possessed by The Exorcist–level demons of his childhood religion—especially when he was dealing with hecklers or the media.
By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing . . . kill yourself. Thank you, thank you, thanks. Just a little thought. I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe, maybe one day, they’ll take root—I don’t know. You try, you do what you can. Kill yourself. Seriously though, if you are, do. Ahh, no really, there’s no rationalization for what you do, and you are Satan’s little helpers, okay? Kill yourself, seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously. No, this is not a joke. You’re going, “There’s going to be a joke coming”—there’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It’s the only way to save your fucking soul, kill yourself. Planting seeds.
And as he aged, his misanthropic humanism became interwoven with what most people have been trained by the media to call conspiracy theory, although Hicks begged to differ and did not consider himself a conspiracy nut but a sunglass-donning They Live! Rowdy Roddy realist, who, like the Shakespeare of Caesar and Macbeth, saw conspiracy as the very language of power.
I have this feeling, man, ’cause you know there’s a handful of people who actually run everything. That’s true. It’s provable, it’s not a fucking—I’m not a conspiracy nut. It’s provable. A handful, a very small elite, run and own these corporations, which include the mainstream media. I have this feeling who’s ever elected president, like Clinton was, no matter what your promises on the campaign trail—blah, blah, blah—when you win, you go into this smoky room with the twelve industrialist-capitalist scum-fucks who got you in there, and you’re in this smoky room and this little film screen comes down, rrrrrrrrrr, and a big guy with a cigar goes, “Roll the film.” And it’s a shot of the Kennedy assassination from an angle you’ve never seen before . . . that looks suspiciously off the grassy knoll. And then the film ends, the screen goes up, and the lights come up, and they go to the new president, “Any questions?”
“Ehh, just what my agenda is?”
Back and to the left. Back and to the left.
Yeah, there’s dick jokes coming up, please relax. Folks, here’s the deal: I editorialize for forty-five minutes, the last fifteen I pull my ’chute, we all pull our ’chutes, and float down to Dick-Joke Island together.
And if Hicks and Shakespeare were correct, then perhaps the greatest conspiracy of them all might be this concept of conspiracy theory that we are ceaselessly assaulted with by a corporate media eager to convince us their evil overlords don’t exist. (Pay no attention to the twelve industrial scum-fucks behind the curtain.) But, as Hicks makes clear, these overlords do exist, and just because there’s not a group of them who actually wears red, sacrifices babies beneath owl statues, and refers to themselves as the Illuminati doesn’t mean they don’t behave with an unfathomably Machiavellian mindset—witness Jeffrey Epstein and the whole Dread Pirate Roberts procession of Epsteins that preceded him in obtaining children for rich people to fuck and then toss into trash bins. With Epstein in mind, we might even want to ask ourselves, “Who is it that benefits from this clusterfuck overuse of the term conspiracy theorist within our media?” Or, a better way to phrase this might be “Could Jeffrey Epstein have thrived for decades peddling poor children to powerful, rich perverts were it not for the term conspiracy theorist protecting him?”
Now if we examine this concept I like to call conspiracy-theory theory, we discover that the modern use of the term conspiracy theorist was invented in 1964 after the Kennedy assassination (“back and to the left”) in order to ridicule the people who were questioning the rather fanciful conclusions of the Warren Commission by comparing these skeptics to the mooncalves who believed in Little Green Men. In a sense the term conspiracy theorist is a magic wand of dismissal that saves you from actually having to engage any of the ideas held by these so-called “conspiracy theorists.” Think Kennedy got shot from the grassy knoll? Little Green Men. Believe it unlikely that Bobby got shot in the front of the chest by somebody standing directly behind him? Little Green Men. Believe that George Jr. stole an election or that Paul Wellstone’s plane got brought down by industrial scum-fucks or that Bill Clinton fucked children or that the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were conceived inside a think tank funded by the military-industrial complex? Little Green Men. And this method of ridicule via false equivalency works swimmingly well, because, as George Orwell once pointed out, nothing can withstand the elephantine power of ridicule. Even imperialism, as Orwell demonstrated, can be brought to its knees by the sound of peasant laughter.
Orwell’s insights into the amazing power of ridicule were not lost on the intelligence agencies and think tanks that for decades now have been employing those two words conspiracy theorist as a way to neuter our brains and thereby protect some really evil scum-fucks. And what’s sad, and damning, is just how easy it is to control not only what we say but what we dare to think.
Aldous Huxley, in a letter he wrote to his friend Orwell, argued that, inside a democracy, mind control, or what he called mesmerism, was a more economical solution to controlling the masses than brute force, and that it was therefore inevitable that America’s ruling class would seize upon the opium of entertainment to keep us in check rather than the costlier method of torturing us. But for Huxley’s mesmerism to actually work its magic requires a constant re-enforcement of exactly how you will be ridiculed should you fall out of line. The human test subject must be repeatedly threatened however subliminally—Conspiracy theorist! Little Green Men!—with the despised subclass of freakzoids he will be compared to should he question the endless lies of the media—what many call “news”—and along those lines I would not be surprised to learn that the Flat Earthers and Sandy Hookers and Pizza Gaters of Reddit are getting a lot of encouragement via intelligence agencies, with a zillion bots at their disposal, in order to create the necessary illusion of this giant subclass of idiots you will be lumped together with should you think for yourself and speak truth to power.
And if any of this sounds trivial, please recall that the scientists who have been screaming at top lung about climate change have been dismissed for decades now as . . . conspiracy theorists. There’s nothing trivial about how well this method preys on our primal fear of being socially ridiculed and isolated and therefore rendered unfuckable. Conspiracy-theory theory allows lawless factions to get away with assassinations and plunder, and it has been instrumental in creating the normalization of the endless war we don’t even notice any more, such is our enthrallment with the cult of hideous violence we call entertainment. And although this method of mind control works on women to some extent, it was designed to attack the brains of men via our famously frail egos and our staunch refusal to believe in the existence of people in think tanks who are astronomically smarter than us. Yet we men, who are so certain our brains cannot be controlled, also walk around constantly terrified of being exposed for the gullible chimps we secretly know ourselves to be. And this explains why the males of our species will do damn near anything in order to be perceived as intelligent, employable, and therefore fuckable. We will not only agree with the pundits that the sky is green and the grass blue, but we will believe it and start ridiculing and bullying anybody, especially women, who says otherwise, and I strongly suspect if Bill Hicks were alive today, he would be thundering this gospel of conspiracy-theory theory between asthmatic coughs from his wheelchair inside the burning Church of Misanthropic Humanism.
If, like most rubes, you believe mind control only works on people of lesser intelligence, then, hey, congratulations: you are a shining example of how horribly effective this method is, because conspiracy-theory theory works especially well inside academia, where the unrelenting peer-review atmosphere constantly pricks and pinches the primal fear of social ridicule. The bigger the ego, the bigger the stakes, the better it works.
It was sixty years ago when Jung lamented he wouldn’t live long enough to understand the emerging archetype then called “flying saucers,” but today we have a better understanding of these crafts, and even our (ahem) respected newspapers are suddenly acknowledging that, yes, UFOs are real and furthermore it’s undeniable that the UFO phenomenon is and always has been attached to the phenomenon of nuclear proliferation. Leslie Kean’s groundbreaking book UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record, a New York Times Best Seller, established for any reasonable mind that UFOs have been obsessed with our nuclear-storage facilities since the 1940s. Her reporting was initially published in the New York Times, and her sources are the military brass and servicepersons who guard these facilities and have everything to lose by coming forward to warn us of this disturbing truth. The much ballyhooed “Tic Tac UFO” footage, endorsed by the Navy, reaffirms Kean’s thesis. And just recently, The Washington Examiner ran another article about the military people who keep stepping forward to warn us that UFOs have been infiltrating our nuclear silos for decades.
Not only are UFOs stalking these silos, and sending beams down into them, the crafts are actually hijacking the computers that launch these doomsday warheads. According to firsthand expert testimony (ahem), UFOs have repeatedly shut down entire lines of nuclear missiles—not just in America but apparently in Russia as well—and, far more harrowing, UFOs have even instigated the launch sequences for these warheads before cutting them off at the last seconds. It’s a mind-blowing reality difficult to digest for anybody, but especially for the military officers tasked with guarding these silos.
For decades now my own interest in UFOs, which started with the Pascagoula abduction of the early 70s, has centered on the multimillion-dollar dome of disinformation that has been built over the phenomenon. The extent of this disinformation campaign baffled me until the day I watched Robert Hastings’s documentary UFO & Nukes: The Secret Link Revealed, with its parade of military officers coming forward to confirm that our nuclear silos have been breached for decades. That quick, I finally understood why millions if not billions of dollars had been spent to create this impenetrable net of I-Want-To-Believe bullshit meant to distract the curious from the disturbing truth lurking in the grassy knoll. And, with apologies to Bill Hicks, I am sympathetic to the military here. (Full disclosure: my dad was in the army and my mom was a secretary for the navy with a high security clearance.) If you were a general, would you polish off your stars to announce to the cameras that the United States is utterly impotent in the face of a species so technologically advanced that we appear to be precocious bugs to them? No, pleading impotence is not an option inside the military code—nor should it be—and in order to prevent having to make this confession, the military has spent an infinity of our tax dollars to create this protective dome of incredibly creative lies, which in turn has created a UFO mythology as rich as the works of Homer, Virgil, Valmiki, and Vyasa combined.
So, yes, we should be unnerved, although it’s equally true that these beings who are toying with our warheads have seldom acted with overt malice, and that is encouraging, yet all of this raises an obvious point that I have never once heard discussed, which is the likelihood that the our military, and indeed every military on earth, no longer has the ability to launch a nuclear warhead at another country. We have been told by eyewitnesses that our nuclear silos have been infiltrated since the 1940s by at least one incomprehensibly advanced species. Now why would these so-called aliens start playing games with our deadly missiles? Simply to show off and let us know they are superior? A more logical mind might suggest they are letting us know they, and not us, are in control of our nuclear arsenals. If you’ve ever marveled at the fact that our species of only relatively great apes has for eight decades now broken character by not splifficating our planet inside a nuclear holocaust, then here you have the answer to that riddle: we haven’t destroyed Earth because the grown-ups won’t let us. And at the risk of tenaciously clinging to logic, it would follow that not even our generals know for certain if we are capable of launching a nuclear warhead at another country because the only way to find out would be to try it. And if this scenario is true—and logic it could be—then we are spending billions of tax dollar every year to create weapons for space aliens. Which hardly seems wise.
So, yeah, welcome to my world, and now that we’re all glancing tremulously at the sky, let’s turn our telescope upon a less dreadful side of the UFO phenomenon, one that harkens back to Bill Hicks’s idea of artists as shamanic agents of evolution. In the many decades since UFOs stumped Carl Jung, there have been strong hints that these technological angels are not only intent on tweaking our bombs but with tweaking our evolutionary processes, perhaps even our DNA, in order to nudge us toward a more ecologically enlightened mindset. This is not to say that all human interactions with these beings has been beneficial—they haven’t—but I think it’s fair to state that the aliens are behaving with a great deal more maturity than human beings have ever exercised over inferior species. Like our military, these aliens appear to be operating within a code and might even be protecting us from the wrath of less patient aliens (you can’t have good aliens without bad aliens), and it also seems feasible that these good aliens are attempting, if only for selfish reasons, to evolve our species in order to save a planet perched on the precipice of the Book of Revelation.
The Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who, prior to his death in 2016, had claimed for years that UFOs are real, experienced a phenomenon while in space that he compared to Buddhist enlightenment. The writer Whitley Stieber and more recently the Quantum Computing prodigy Deep Prasad have both described overwhelming spiritual experiences associated with alien visitations that seem to mimic the electrical phenomenon known as kundalini awakening in Tantric Hinduism. So it’s possible these aliens might be tweaking us humans in an attempt to save us from ourselves by forcing evolution upon us.
But before we get too touchy-feely here, abduction experiences can be horrific in nature, and we should not assume these aliens are spiritually advanced just because they are technologically advanced. The effect of technology upon humans might in fact argue the opposite. We’ve gone retrograde and appear to be slumping backward into monkeyhood. The Elizabethans could memorize entire books, yet I can’t recite my own phone number. The printing press caused us to abandon the memory systems that gave us the Renaissance. I suppose it’s possible a tribe that’s quickly deteriorating intellectually might at the same time be evolving spiritually or morally, but I don’t see much evidence of that happening. And yet, in spite of our failings, these aliens continue to demonstrate a remarkable patience with our war-loving species. We are the Klingons in this script, and yet somebody seems to be holding back the hand that could easily wipe us out of existence with our own weapons. It’s enough to make you suspect we are redeemable, and perhaps we are.
Before he was buried in Mississippi, Bill Hicks got his wish for a sober close encounter with a UFO. But this second experience also comes with a caveat in that it was induced not by magic mushroom but by the New Age music of Yanni. One good reason never to quit drugs and is that the Gods of Irony will stir to life. Informed of his pending demise from cancer, the sober Hicks moved back in with his Mississippi parents, who had given him so much material over the years, and one day soon thereafter went to get a massage during which he experienced a vision that skeptics will dismiss as a dream but which Hicks called a vision.
This dream or vision was Edenic in nature, and Hicks described its beauty inside an essay he wrote just before his death that was included by John Lahr in Love All the People: The Essential Bill Hicks. In this self-described vison, Hicks found himself living a parallel existence filled with all the conventions of human happiness that he had sacrificed for his career on the road. He found himself living in a traditional house in the woods with his loving wife, who didn’t exist in real life, and his two lovely children, who didn’t exist either. His long-dead childhood dog was there along with two Great Dane pups, one named Crotus, the other Chiron. (Crotus was the Satyr so devoted to the Muses he invented the practice of applause, whereas Chiron was the famously soft-on-humans centaur who taught us the secrets of medicinal herbs.) When these three dogs suddenly ran off barking, and his wife and children chased after the dogs, Hicks decided to follow them over a hill, the top of which gave him a view of a second sun visible in the sky. This second sun turned out to be a small, bright craft circling above a large metal flying saucer. While being flooded with feelings of joy and love, Hicks remained wary until his family started gesturing for him to board the craft with them. “You’ve been waiting for your whole life,” his imaginary wife yelled to him. Eventually he acquiesed, but before actually entering the saucer with his family, Hicks glanced back at the house, so filled with the happiness denied him in real life, and noticed the front door had been left open, and for a moment he stood there imagining his friends and what they might think while examining these last clues left of him on earth. “What happened to Hicks?” All that would remain to answer that question were the footsteps through wet grass leading to a giant saucer-shaped indention left in the field. Laughing at the perfection of those details, he boarded the saucer in a state of euphoria as it lifted into the stars—dogs, gods, and all.
The world is like a ride at an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think that it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills, and it’s very brightly colored, and it’s very loud and it’s fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question—is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us. They say, “Hey! Don’t worry, don’t be afraid, ever, because, this is just a ride.” And we . . . kill those people. Ha ha ha. “Shut him up! We have a lot invested in this ride. SHUT HIM UP. Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and my family. This just has to be real.” It’s just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that—you ever notice that?—and let the demons run amok. But it doesn’t matter because . . . it’s just a ride. And we can change it any time we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one. Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money that we spend on weapons and defense each year, and instead spend it feeding, clothing, and educating the poor of the world, which it would do many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace. Good night. 
Lee Durkee is the author of the novel Rides of the Midway (W. W. Norton). His stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Sun, Best of the Oxford American, Zoetrope: All Story, Tin House, New England Review, and Mississippi Noir. In 2021 Scribner will publish his memoir, Stalking Shakespeare, which chronicles his decade-long obsession with trying to find lost portraits of William Shakespeare. A former cab driver, he lives in North Mississippi. The Last Taxi Driver is his first novel in twenty years.
