Michael 23 and E – Eden Bloom

Not an obituary, a reflection on the moments in time I stood with Michael 23.

There is something about getting off a greyhound bus in Tempe, Arizona, finding a payphone to call a number scrawled on a letter sent through the post a few weeks prior to get taken to a repurposed strip motel nicknamed “Little Guyana.”

I’ve struggled to get my head around Michael 23’s impact in and on my life. I’m hopeful that as I gather and share some of my memories and reflections that will take shape in the foreground. While an amazing number of people know Michael as a visionary and an artist, I knew him also as a brother and a teacher. He was one of a few men who I felt I could be vulnerable with back in the days when that was truly a radical act.

This is a personal reflection on the impact of M23’s influence on my life and work. It is not meant as any obituary, as I only stood near Michael for a short amount of time and can in no way document more than a few blips on the map. Sadly I do not know him as well in the present. Though with sadness I now look forward to meeting his family and friends I did not know while he was here.

For me it is hard to talk about Michael without wrapping him in the people, the tribe and community that he had gathered around him back in the day. For me it’s impossible to talk about M23 without talking about Thought Crime and going back in time.

I received a letter in the mail posted from Tempe, AZ. As most letters I received from Thought Crime in those days, it was written in Maria’s hand. When I think of Maria these days I think of her hugs and her wisdom.

In the spring of 1991 I was 21 years old and, as I always have, was struggling with my existence. I had said all the right things to the doctors to get released from the top-floor psychiatric ward at the local hospital. The holiday season, which had always ravaged me, threw me into a suicidal depression that my girlfriend at the time positioned to take a vacation with her eventual husband.

When I got out I took up in a transient hotel, a closet with a kitchen and a phone in Ypsilanti. It was below a pigeon roost and above a porn shop. Having lost my job and dropping the semester in school, I set about the business of putting myself back together again.

This awareness is a reflection rather than how I perceived what was happening at the time. I think that I had some notion that I was molting or shedding rather than suffering. I had lost everything I wanted, pushed away everything I didn’t, and was left to my own devices. I had to either find a path or manifest the noose that I still find a place to hang in the majority of rooms I spend time in.

I made art. I called it ritual. I did it on the the kitchen floor under the bright and only florescent light. Burroughs taught us to cut up the word, Barker taught me that bodies were books. In my synthesis of these self appointed and therefore appropriated queer godfathers’ influence, I strove to manifest myself in the future, ie to survive by dissecting myself into distinct pieces or pages and then scattering those pages to the wind.

I photocopied and enlarged my drivers license, glued my photo on to cardboard and cut my face into puzzle pieces. I scrawled letters on the floor to all the nodes on the network that I really didn’t know was real. I put everything I had into these letters and issued forth unconditional trust (a long forgotten art) to those who opened them.

I took apart the puzzle pieces, putting each piece and a letter into stamped envelopes. They waited on the altar for moons to quarter and numbers to grow, through ritual after ritual of self-dissection until the 23rd when they were mailed to Atlantic City, Chicago, Austin, Tempe, Fullerton, San Diego and San Francisco.

In the following weeks I would hear back from every node but Atlantic City and would purchase greyhound tickets weaving across the country to put myself back together again. One of those pieces went to Thought Crime.

Burroughs said when we cut up the present the future leaks out. I cut my present up, threw them up in the air and then, with great intention strove to recollect the pages and put myself back together into the future they gleaned.

One of those pieces went to Thought Crime. This is for the most part a story of what happened to me when I went to ‘retrieve’ the piece I sent to Michael and Maria in Tempe. It is a precarious thing to get off a bus in the middle of the desert and go stay with people you have never met before.

There were no cell pones, I used pay phones traveling across the country and back by greyhound bus. I few times I called and no one picked up and I sat for hours using limited change to make costly freaked-out messages on machines.

I wasn’t really human at this point, it would take another decade to start to live into the current manifestation so a big part of this journey was to learn new and different ways to share with others, to possibly live in community after everything I had been through. While each stop on my tour taught me exactly what I needed to know to move forward, in Tempe I would say that the greatest healing occurred.

Somewhere between gutter punk squat and hippie commune, when I walked into Little Guyana for the first time I was permanently changed. I kick myself for not having video taped more of the entire space while I was there. As is still the case I was super mindful of the camera as violence. Now that my memories wain I do wish to more clearly ‘see’ those structures, the strip motel where I barely slept because I rarely slept, the main house where I spent the majority of my time talking with Micheal about Indonesia or Gnostic text no one else in my world had ever read or helping Maria with some mundane task that she was making magical.

I’m not certain that I was a help in anyway, but my mind was seriously impressed upon by the intentionality of the space, the collaboration, the community.

I should have spent more time mentoring creative skills, screen printing and whatnot, but at the time I recall that presses were down and the emphasis was working on the house. So that’s what we did. That said, M23’s art, in particular the zines and shirts put out by Thought Crime.