01/10/01

At that point in time around the Manfred and Gladiola episode, Clean Phil appeared to be pretty well through with his Michael Stipe days and his Joseph Smith days (or so one would think) and appeared outwardly like any other woodchuck left around here— content to remain covered in cow shit most of the time, living in squalor, shunned by the neighborhood, hardly venturing beyond the confines of Porch Rot’s acreage. Just a few years earlier Phil had been bedecked like a girl in makeup and traveling all over the freaking country with a REM cover band he named Spanking Time For Frankenstein. He even had a girlfriend back in those years, some crazy anorexic chick from Long Island who dropped out of Vassar to travel around with him, leading to her being disowned by her parents. Nowadays she’s a published poet, for whatever that’s worth. Plumped up pretty nicely though. Still a little Goth though. She came around looking for Phil a couple of times now since ‘98. Last time she stopped by she told me she had managed to get published a collection of things Phil had written. From what I understand she went missing too. Maybe the same mothership that snatched up Clean Phil snatched her up too. I guess Phil met her--- Delia was her name --- at a Karaoke bar outside the campus of New Paltz College back around ‘91. Phil showed up there one night out of nowhere, began blowing people away with his renditions of It’s the End of the World as We Know It and Losing My Religion. He had no social skills, of course. He was never a college guy--- had no connections with the college lifestyle--- but somehow music and his clever, obsessive mind bridged some gaps for him. His perfect mimicry of Stipe's voice and mannerisms caught the attention of a group of student musicians, who were willing to overlook his other-worldly freakishness and barn odor to form a band around his talent. And so it was that he got swept away from the farm for awhile into a new reality of artistic expression and notoriety. What a fucking trip.

Phil’s Stipe obsession gave way suddenly to religious fanaticism, from what I understand, one day in early ‘93. The band was traveling from a show at Oswego College to another one at Buffalo and some time was taken to smoke pot and visit the Joseph Smith museum at Palmyra. Where the other band members ridiculed the museum displays, Phil was completely transfixed by the story of the Mormon prophet and his early travails in Upstate New York. Phil’s brain suddenly reprogrammed, I guess you could say, and suddenly he couldn’t be bothered with imitating Michael Stipe, covering REM, or singing in a traveling band from that point. Porch Rot said when Phil came home after that tour he took all his band stuff out back and started a bonfire. The only evidence I found in his room of his earlier REM obsession was a CD of the album Document which had slipped down the wall behind a dresser into a gap between the wall and the baseboard.

I’m rather fond of The Finest Work Song, the first track of that album. I’d still like to know what this line might entail for me though:

The time has been engaged
To Throw Thoreau and rearrange

By March of that year, Phil was camped outside the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas holding a protest vigil during the government siege there. Whether he bought a tee-shirt there from Timothy McVeigh, another upstate New York boy drawn obsessively to the tragic site, is anybody’s guess.

I have my worries though.